Description
A Small Boy and Others
I
In the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of
William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and
domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become
the more intelligible and interesting, I found one of the consequences
of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense
of some of the others. For it was to memory in the first place that my
main appeal for particulars had to be made; I had been too near a
witness of my brother’s beginnings of life, and too close a participant,
by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved
him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of
significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history,
than I could hope to express or apply. To recover anything like the full
treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live
over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with
whatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer and
thinner passages, after the manner of every one’s experience; and the
effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my
subject again and again difficult–so inseparably and beautifully they
seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation
or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. This meant that
aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they
showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that I
might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them,
using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. To knock at
the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide–to
see the world with
Product ID: 9781776780464
Sku: 9781776780464
