June 27, 2025

It is said that God gave us free will, intending it to be his greatest gift. But sometimes we wonder whether now, after the Fall, that gift has not become a kind of curse. We are not only allowed but required to choose. A choice is the very thing that children think they want, but for every thing we choose, there is a price: namely, that which we did not choose. To live is not just one choice but a lifelong series of choices. Yet everything we did not choose does not vanish but continues to haunt us. However satisfying the life that we have chosen, in some part of our mind we are aware that that we could have chosen differently, and unlived life may someday rise up before us and demand a reckoning.

The most famous expression of this theme is of course Roberrt Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” so famous, indeed, that it has perhaps become the equivalent of a pop song heard so often that it has become unlistenable. If we look at it more closely, however, it becomes a complicated, ambiguous poem saying something complicated and ambiguous about life. We expect it to be saying, “Always take the road less traveled instead of the conventional path. Yes, you will regret the road not taken, but it is worth it to be original and individualistic.” But critics have noted that the wording of the poem actually contradicts itself. The speaker is more or less willing himself to believe that his path is a road less traveled by—but in fact there is no real proof that it is. The speaker chooses his road

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

We get the feeling that the speaker needs to think of his road in a kind of romanticized way, as off the beaten path, and everybody knows that’s the kind of path that accounts of the myth of the hero tell you to take if you really want to find the Grail. But in fact he rather awkwardly admits that his choice is more or less arbitrary. There is no proof that the path he chooses is special. And of course the same is true of us. Life would be simpler if there were one road that is clearly heroic and adventurous, leading into the forest of mystery, and the other safe and conventional. But more often our choices are ambiguous, and we will ourselves to think of our chosen life as the adventurous choice. Perhaps it is—but perhaps the roads are equal. Yet we have to choose, and, whichever one we choose, the road not taken will haunt us.

God gave us free will so that we would be free, like him, not just automatons hard-wired with his instructions. Theologically, this runs headlong into a huge contradiction, because we are at the same time predestined. God has decided whether we will be saved or damned even before we are born. This is an intractable paradox, which for the moment we will set aside and take God at his word that he has granted us the dignity of being autonomous, of making our own destiny. In addition, God has given us a second gift, so that we are not left to choose blindly: the power of reason. “Reason is but choosing,” Milton said, an aphorism he liked so much that he repeated it in both prose and in Paradise Lost.

But that is not the full story. Milton is no rationalist. He knows that reason needs a faculty that reveals what the choices are, so that reason can evaluate them and choose the best. That faculty is the imagination, which presents images of possibility for the reason and its reality principle to choose from. Milton does not use the term “imagination,” but he belonged to the far left wing of Protestantism known as the Inner Light movement, which included Quakerism. God is not just a transcendent, far distant supernatural being. He is also—or instead, depending on theology—a presence within, for Milton an inner light that compensated for the outer darkness of his blindness. But it is possible to experience a sense of some mysterious faculty within without identifying it with the divine. The inward presence may or may not generate visual images, but it acts as a sense of possibilities, what Jung’s theory of psychological types calls intuition, which is counterpoised against its opposite, sensation, which is the sense of reality or “things as they are,” the constraints against possibility.

Jung has an essay called “The Stages of Life” which I have found useful again and again. Its argument is organized according to the conflict between lived and unlived life, and the price paid, no matter how fulfilling the life lived, for what is inevitably excluded. He begins with the passage from childhood to young adulthood, and much of what he says strikes home to me because I teach college students who are in the midst of that transition. Traditional societies have initiation rites to guide young people through this passage. I am no anthropologist, but from the descriptions one gets the impression that “traditional” entails a kind of social conformism by means of which the young are firmly inserted into the various roles of adulthood, so that the element of choosing is minimized. Rather than being encouraged to develop their individuality, young people are conditioned to fit into prescribed social roles. We are told that the same is true today in countries that are not fully Westernized. But in contemporary America we do not have rites of initiation any longer because we no longer try to mold young people to “fit in.” This is a relatively new phenomenon: the conformism of the 50’s, which stressed being “well-adjusted,” was rebelled against in the 60’s by my generation, which rejected many of the traditional social roles and expectations, many of which were becoming obsolete anyway. The expanded ability to choose a life path led, however, to an increased uncertainty. Liberal arts college education from perhaps the 1950’s was understood as having a twofold purpose. One purpose was enrichment and the expansion of horizons, but a more practical purpose was exposing young people to a range of life and career opportunities. The “smorgasboard” nature of undergraduate education, with a wide range of “core” or “general education” courses, was sometimes resented by students who had a clear career path and did not want to be slowed down by all those random required courses. But it was necessary for students who did not know who they were, what their true talents were, or what life options were available.

The system only broke down when life began to disintegrate economically for middle class families, who have been increasingly unable to afford a leisurely four years of liberal education for their offspring. This has been sad, for those four sequestered years of what Thomas Mann, in a different context, called “hermetic pedagogy” provided an often enjoyable yet also fruitful period in which students could grow and mature before having to face the adult world. Granted, some students needed to be prodded along towards choosing a major and therefore a career and eventual graduation. There was a comic type in academic satires of the “eternal student”—Zonker in Doonesbury, for example—who just kept taking courses but deliberately avoided graduating. But that type is simply an exaggeration of a tendency in all of us as young people, what Jung calls “a more or less patent clinging to the childhood level of consciousness, a resistance to the fateful forces in and around us which would involve us in the world. Something in us wishes to remain a child” (9).

Entering the adult world, however, means confronting the world’s demands. We have to try to balance what we are “interested in” with what the world will pay for. And this is the first big moment at which we begin to accrue a sense of unlived life. As Jung puts it, “we are forced to limit ourselves to the attainable, and to differentiate particular aptitudes in which the socially effective individual discovers his true self. | Achievement, usefulness and so forth are the ideals that seem to point the way out of the confusions of the problematical state” (11). But this way out comes at a price: “We limit ourselves to the attainable, and this means renouncing all our other psychic possibilities...Everyone can call to mind friends or schoolmates who were promising and idealistic youngsters, but who, when we meet them again years later, seem to have grown dry and cramped in a narrow mould” (11). A bit later, he adds, “the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes” (12). Meeting gifted former students again in later years is a study in how the compromises necessary in later life necessarily change people. Thankfully, few of them have “grown dry and cramped in a narrow mould.” But it is true that there is sometimes a lot of lumber in that lumber room.

Since I teach English, a good deal of the time it means that students who were talented writers never wrote much of anything once they graduated. It does not mean they were dilettantes or slackers. There was simply no time, no energy. And there is often a wistful regret. They now feel too old to go back to it, though this is not really true. I think it is more that the sense of youthful open-endedness is gone. When Adam and Eve leave Eden at the end of Paradise Lost, Milton says that “The world was all before them where to choose / Their place of rest.” That may sound like an inviting opportunity, but in fact the lines are ironic. By that point Adam and Eve have learned that all choices in a fallen world are going to be equivocal, and come with a price. They will choose to have children, only to have one of their children murder his brother. People who extol the virtues of “traditional family life” often romanticize it. The Bible is more realistic. How do you recover and go on when one child is murdered by another, who is then banished? Adam and Eve coped as they could, and had a replacement son, Seth, but there would always have been the dark family history lying under the surface. And we may sympathize with the lot of the replacement son, who has to live knowing he exists out of his parents’ need for a substitute. This happens. Northrop Frye had to live with the knowledge that he was a replacement for a favored older brother, Howard, who was killed in World War I. Did this drive him to become the astonishingly productive genius that he became?

Having children and raising a family is in fact probably the biggest reason for unlived life. Jung’s essay does not deal with it because his discussion is male-oriented, focused on the sacrifices made for career and a place in the world, which in that time were sacrifices made mostly by men. But it is women who have had to give up much of their lives for the sake of caring for children and a household. And one of the commonest results of unlived life is pent-up rage, which, as it could rarely be expressed openly, can take the form of a constantly negative mood expressed in insidious, poisonous remarks. Many an “angel about the house” was a difficult figure who could not help resenting the darling children for whom she had given up the chance to develop her own talents. I have been reading the biography of Robertson Davies, the great Canadian novelist in whose fiction a number of negative mothers blight the lives of their children, and they are all Davies’ attempts to come to terms with his own mother. As biographer Judith Skelton Grant puts it:

Davies had come to believe that his mother possessed great, but thwarted imaginative qualities, and to feel that he had inherited his imaginative reach from her. The bite she gave to conversation and family stories with her fresh, sharp tongue did play a part in nurturing his own imagination. But his supposition is largely rooted in his conviction that she was a writer manqué, her powers turned in on themselves by her lack of opportunity. (360)

Grant is skeptical that the mother had any significant talent. But does that matter? Surely it is the thwarting that is destructive, whatever the degree of talent. Davies’ mother never had the chance to find out whether her talent was great or small, and a minor gift can be just as precious to its possessor as great genius. Raising children who turn out well is a wonderful achievement, but it necessitates a kind of thoroughgoing self-effacement. The unlived life in such a case is then the opposite, one of self-development rather than self-surrender. In traditional families, the father also had to sacrifice much of his individual development and fulfilment for the sake of becoming a breadwinner. People on the far right like JD Vance want to force Americans back into the old self-sacrificing family roles. He too is reacting against a negative mother figure, one who was self-indulgent rather than self-sacrificing. The far right wants to suppress individualism in all its forms—which means it is in reaction against American identity itself, because we have always been, since our founding, as the society of individualism par excellence, so much so that the phrase “American individualism” was almost redundant.

It has one valid criticism of the liberal and progressive way of life: we have still not come up with a way to reconcile the demands of individual development with the sacrifices demanded by parenting. Jung’s solution is to suggest that individual development, postponed by the demands of family and careers, may become the task of the second half of life, once the family is grown and finances are more secure. But it is not a perfect solution. Neither, however, is trying to do it all, which has led to a highly exhausting, stressful lifestyle that no doubt contributes to the mental health issues we see in young adults. Another solution is not to have children, which is fine for people like me who are vocation-driven and not that fond of kids anyway. But most people seem to want family. All the solutions are compromises that involve repression of one aspect of the total personality or another. The point is that a stiff-upper-lip resignation is, in the end, not just an ineffective but a dangerous way of dealing with repression, with unlived life. Blake’s aphorism “Better murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” is not self-indulgent individualism but shrewd psychology . Nursing unacted desires can lead to murdering an infant in its cradle. Or to blighting its life in more subtle ways, sometimes disguised as parental love or wise patriarchal authority.

Society responds in wildly erratic ways to those who refuse to nurse unacted desires, who stubbornly refuse to resign themselves to a carefully repressed life. On the one hand, such people can be turned into celebrities through whom the repressed general population lives vicariously. The antics, scandals, and multiple marriages and relationships of actors and pop stars are followed intensely by those who play out their own unlived life through them. Also politicians: a powerful source of Donald Trump’s appeal to his followers has nothing to do with his politics: Trump has no real politics anyway. He is a wish-fulfilment figure. He has gotten filthy rich by screwing people over, and is still doing it. He grabs pussies and gets away with it, going unpunished even after a criminal conviction. He has no impulse control, says all the things, both mean-spirited and boastful, that we may think to ourselves but have been taught cannot be said. He is a spirit of vengeance against all the systems and forces that have ruined the lives of the non-college-educated, which they themselves are powerless to fight. He is their Jungian shadow, and there will never be any buyer’s remorse. They live their unlived lives through him, and will vote for him again. This is what even astute political analysts don’t seem to understand. The economic grievances of Trump voters are real, but their plight has left them vulnerable to a kind of psychological takeover from the unconscious. Given that this is what happened in Hitler’s Germany, it should not be so hard to comprehend.

However, conventional society is capable of scapegoating those it sees as “getting away with something.” Woody Allen elicited fury for taking up with his relationship’s 19-year-old foster daughter. He “got away” with that, and the later allegations of child abuse, for which he was officially investigated and exonerated twice, seem to me fueled by a desire for retroactive revenge. Why him, when any number of celebrities have done comparable things? I read that Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t date any woman older than 25. Is it that Allen let the cat out of the bag by saying, “The heart wants what it wants”? You can live out your unlived life, your fantasies, so long as you don’t erect it into a philosophy that makes repressed people feel they’ve allowed themselves to be duped into a life of unnecessary repression? It isn’t just male unlived life. The great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, recipient of the Nobel Prize in 2013, was the subject of a posthumous scandal last year when her daughter made public the fact that she had been molested when young by Munro’s second husband, and that Munro, when confronted by her daughter, refused to distance herself from the husband, saying that she needed him and that the daughter must work it out for herself. I am not defending Munro, but I was not surprised to learn this. I spoke in a previous newsletter of having taught an entire course in Munro, making use mostly of stories from her mid-career, many of which featured women like Munro herself in middle age, separating from conventional marriages and determined to live out unlived life no matter who disapproved of it. Although Munro was unapologetic to her daughter, at least one troubled story from that time about a man who abuses children while his relationship turns a blind eye to it out of emotional need shows that she felt guilty about her choice. The problem with unlived life is that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

That raises the question of whether it is possible to live without a residue of unlived life, to live so that when you arrived at the end, you would have no regrets. Classical Greece was the only Western culture before modern times that valued individualism, so it is no surprise that Greek philosophy did considerable thinking about what constitutes the “good life,” which would of necessity be a life that was chosen and not preordained by social conventions. From the Greek tradition comes the Delphic oracle’s famous counsel, “Know thyself,” as well as Socrates’ saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. Of course, examining life entails questioning received values, and that is only possible in a society that values liberal tolerance, and there are limits to such tolerance: Socrates uttered his famous aphorism during his trial, after which he was put to death for excessive questioning of social pieties. Some people have always been skeptical of the possibility of living a full life within society. Even democratic societies demand a good deal of renunciation of their citizens for the sake of social order and economic efficiency. Colleges in our time have had to defend the ideal of liberal education as the nurturing of the unique individual personality against demands of parents and the business world that young people be educated in a way that is “practical,” which means trained to fit into various slots in the job world.

The literary convention of the pastoral, originating in ancient Greece but enthusiastically revived in the Renaissance, grew out of such skepticism. What kept the pastoral conventions alive despite their artificiality was the dream of a life outside of the restraints and corruptions of the city and the court, the dream of ditching the rat race and going to live the simple life, one that resembled the lost Classical Golden Age and the Garden of Eden. This came across the Atlantic to become the pioneer spirit that drove the settling of the country. People left the corruptions and constraints of Europe for a New World, a second start. The westward drive in American history was not motivated by abstract notions of Manifest Destiny so much as by a dream of rugged individualism. Each time civilization grew to the point of repeating the old constraints, of hemming the individual in with too many laws and curtailing personal freedom, those seeking a fuller life lit out for the territories. As we saw in last week’s newsletter, this dream of the frontier was projected onto the space program at the moment when the geographical frontier had reached its limit at the Pacific. Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones (1952) is a novel about the Stone family, who travel the solar system for the same reason the bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see. Heinlein imagines that space technology as it matured would become less complicated, less expensive, and more reliable, so that a family-sized ship could be purchased and operated like an RV today. Heinlein’s novel was what was then called a “juvenile,” in other words a young-adult novel intended to inspire a younger generation with what Heinlein saw as an admirable wanderlust.

The Biblical precedent for the American frontier spirit is perhaps the Israelite nostalgia for the good old days when Israel was 12 wandering tribes, each independent, not yet fenced into cities, much less a decadent empire. Israel’s greatest king, David, began as a shepherd boy, and composed psalms, including the pastoral 23^rd psalm. On the Classical side, long before Socrates, the Odyssey showed a hero who was described as polytropos, of many turnings. If there is a portrait in literature of a life lived to the full, it is that of Odysseus. He in fact lives out both yearnings: for a life of wandering adventure in the first half of the epic, for home, family, and civilization in the second half. As we saw last week, Tennyson has him say, “I will live life to the full,” and Robert Heinlein made a line of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” the title of his last novel in old age, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Both Dante and Tennyson made Ulysses (the Latin name of Odysseus) so hungry for a fully lived life that they had him set out for new adventures in his old age.

The only character in literature that could be matched with Odysseus as exemplar of the life of many turnings is Goethe’s Faust. In the poem’s first scene, Faust has lapsed into suicidal despair because he has reached middle age and has never really lived. He will go on to a range of adventures as various as those of Odysseus and to serial relationships with Gretchen and Helen of Troy. The poem’s final scene hints that there are yet further developments in store for him, even after he has died at the age of 100. In many ways, Faust is an anti-hero, yet the extraordinary variety of his long life reflects that of his creator. Goethe filled an astonishingly full life with experience and achievements in poetry, fiction, theatre, science, politics, and romantic love, and was still going strong in his later 80’s.

The impulse to send Odysseus out on a new series of adventures in old age fits the pattern of Jung’s “Stages of Life” essay, which recommends the second half of life as the time to live out life unlived in the first half. If you look at profiles on dating sites, as I used to do, you will learn that many people have invented this solution for themselves on a modest scale. There is much talk by older people of “bucket lists” and a widely pervasive desire to travel the world. This is largely a recent phenomenon, made possible by greatly increased life expectancies of the last few generations. Jung’s essay of 1931 was perhaps a bit ahead of its time: the life expectancy in the United States did not begin to extend beyond the age of about 50 until about 1950, thanks to modern medicine and modern diet.

A fully lived life is an ideal, but the attempt to realize it comes up against various constraints. Some may even be, so to speak, built in. Christianity insists, as we have said, that even as we have free will, we are also predestined. Nothing is possible without God, and our “free” choices are made possible—or impossible—by divine grace, which God either grants or withholds for mysterious reasons of his own. Christians are not allowed to believe in fate, but predestination amounts to much the same thing. We are fascinated by people whose lives seemed to be fated or predestined, for better or worse. Some people seem to live charmed lives of miraculous success that seems somehow inevitable, not a product of chance or choice. And some people seem strangely doomed, their lives continuously tragic in a way that makes them seem cursed. The Greeks ascribed such tragedies to the curse of the gods, Oedipus being only the most famous of those who lived out a pattern of disaster without ever having willed to do wrong. It was simply inevitable, not matter what he did, that he fulfill the curse by killing his father and marrying his mother. Some lives are such a succession of bad “accidents” that it seems like something more than random “bad luck” must be involved.

Likewise a sense of fatedness hangs over the lives of some artistically gifted people who seem to have struck a bargain with the gods: I am content to die young if you grant me the highest level of achievement. From Mozart to Rimbaud to Dylan Thomas to the “27 club,” some people have seemed to choose to pack a lifetime’s achievement into their youthful years, leaving nothing unlived, and thus being somehow content to die. A television program of my youth tried to apply this premise to a non-genius. Run for Your Life, which ran from 1965 to 1968, starred Ben Gazzara as a man who was given a year to live and who decided, as the weekly voiceover put it, to “pack 30 years of living into one.” The East has the system of karma, which deals with unlived or badly lived life by allowing an indefinite number of new chances. If you make the wrong choices, you may have to come back as a cockroach, but at least you can try again. Still, free will is qualified: you may have made those bad choices because it was your karma to do so. West or East, the mystery of life breaks down into paradox at the borderline.

Whether or not our lives are determined by invisible powers, there are plenty of visible constraints upon people’s choices, factors that make a certain amount of unlived life fairly inevitable. One is social class and economic circumstances. We happen to have been born into a certain family and thereby certain economic circumstances. The lives of both my parents were constrained by the near-poverty of working class immigrant family life in early 20^th-century America. My dad was fascinated by outer space all his life and had wanted to be an astronomer when he was young, but there was no way a young man from Midvale, Ohio during the Depression was going to acquire that kind of education. My mother, like Davies’, had a powerful yet thwarted creative drive. She tried every craft ever invented, collected ruby and milk glass, and loved books, even though she did not read them until her retirement. Her unlived artistic life had to be lived out through me. Not every mother is a negative mother: most of what may be good about me and my life derives in some way from the woman who tirelessly read bedtime stories to me when I was small. I am glad if I can in some way live out aspects of life she was not able to live out herself.

But I have never envied the rich and the upper class too greatly. Wealth and privilege do not necessarily grant freedom to chose—often quite the contrary, as members of the present British royal family who do not sacrifice themselves to the roles required of royalty find out to their cost. In fact, the choices of royalty are more limited than those of commoners. Great as he was, Shakespeare’s choices for showing human lives as developing over time were limited by the episodic nature of drama. The neo-Classical “unities,” in fact, demanded that plays take place within 24 hours, not that Shakespeare paid such rules any attention. But in his second history play tetralogy, Shakespeare showed a process of development in Prince Hal by extending his story across three plays. Hal is going to be the next king of England, but he refuses to conform. He not only skips meetings, he skips town and hangs out with a band of ne’er-do-wells in a tavern, living a scandalous life. But he clues the audience in through soliloquies that this is part of a deliberate plan to acquaint himself from the ground up with the total life of the people he will rule over, not just with the aristocracy. The understanding he acquires of how the other half lives eventually makes him an enormously popular king, one with a common touch.

The life we live is also circumscribed by our abilities. Is it really “unlived life” if the life we wish to choose is made impossible by lack of the requisite physical or mental gifts? Some limits are obvious. In youth, at my tallest, I was all of 5’8”. There was not a career in basketball waiting for me. Not even a career at something a little more in my line, that of folksinger: I have no voice. But I always urge my students to try for the life they dream of, and not listen to the supposedly realistic life of those around them. My entire generation was told we should not think of becoming academics, that our chances of making it were on the order of the likelihood that a theatre major will become a Hollywood star. I think of that advice, after 40 years of teaching, and realize how little “realistic” advice is often worth. I have learned who I am much more by trying and failing than by succeeding. I learned by trying and failing that I was not the science fiction novelist I had planned on becoming. A brief period of madness in my senior year at college proved to me I was not a playwright.

What comes most naturally to me, namely, criticism, was not on my list, although I should have seen that even as early as high school I loved the “novel of ideas”—or drama of ideas: I fervently wished at the age of 18 that I could be as wise and witty and entertaining as George Bernard Shaw. Two of my later heroes were likewise influenced by Shaw: Robertson Davies, and Northrop Frye, who said he had read pretty much all of Shaw by the age of 15. Davies and Frye themselves both had to go through the process of finding they life they could live the hard way, by trying to live the life they were not suited to live. Davies found that he was only a limited success as a playwright: his genius was only revealed when he began to write novels. We now know from his unpublished writing that Frye harbored all his life a fantasy of writing fiction, but was never able. I do not now feel, in old age, that the science fiction writer and playwright I never was constitute unlived life. “Unlived life” is, I now think, a feeling rather than an experience. If I had never had the chance to try and realize that, no, this isn’t me, I think I would be haunted by the ghosts of alternate selves. But I have laid those ghosts to rest.

Still, this unlived life business is tricky. I hardly feel that I am a “man of destiny,” the epithet borne by Napoleon. But when I think of the “accidents” that have determined my life, they seem either along the lines of being struck by lightning—a one-in-15,300 chance, I just looked it up—or somehow weirdly “meant to be.” In all senses of “weirdly,” since the word comes from wyrd, Old English for fate or destiny. After all, such weird moments are part of the myth of the hero. Parsifal was raised in isolation in a forest by his mother so that he would not be inspired to become and knight and get his fool self killed like his father. So what are the chances that a contingent of knights happen to ride past the cottage, inspiring the young boy eventually to run away and become the knight who will discover the holy Grail? My poor-man’s version of this was to be handed Frye’s Fearful Symmetry by Ted Harakas at the age of 19, and Frye turned out to be my Grail. What, for that matter, contrived that Ted would be present at Baldwin-Wallace College to become the mentor of a very confused young man from Canton, Ohio? The life I feel miraculously lucky to have lived would be “unlived life” if these “accidents” had not happened to point my choices in the right direction. Later, I did make some of my own destiny by choosing to apply to graduate school at the University of Toronto because that was where Frye was. “Realistic” advice would have said don’t bother, because Toronto used to call itself “the Harvard of the north,” and would surely not be interested in an American from an unknown school in the Midwest. Then, when I was there, Frye’s secretary, the wonderful Jane Widdicombe, contrived to get me the job of Frye’s research assistant for 11 years.

Who would I be if all that had not happened and shaped the life I have lived? An alter ego who did not go on to have the vocation I have lived out would be so different as to seem an alien. I would not recognize him, not find him a version of myself, but rather some other. That is the plot of perhaps the most famous work of fiction about the unlived life, Henry James’s ghost story “The Jolly Corner” (1908). In it, a man returns to New York City, to the building in which he had grown up, the “jolly corner,” after having left it at the age of 23 to live abroad for 33 years. He ends up supervising the renovation of the building, and finds he has a knack for it, which surprises him because that is the kind of American practicality and commercialism that he had always found crass and vulgar. His return in his late 50’s becomes a mid-life crisis as he becomes aware that the building is haunted by a ghost. At the end of the story, he confronts the ghost—who is himself, a version of what he would be if he had never left. The ghost is his unlived life, what he would have been if he had remained an American and not had not become an expatriate. The ghost is wounded, missing two fingers of his right hand, but his presence is powerful. Critical commentary points to what is fairly obvious, that James, the American expatriate, is contemplating what he would have been if he had not left his native country.

This seems, well, fated to be Robertson Davies’ newsletter. The Deptford Trilogy, which made Davies famous, begins with the novel Fifth Business (1970), which itself begins with a snowball thrown by one boy at another, the narrator. The snowball misses and instead strikes a pregnant woman, causing her to give birth prematurely, resulting in her mental illness and the disabilities of her son. While the boy who threw the snowball refuses to take responsibility, the narrator does try to take responsibility for the unintended consequences. In mid-life, an analyst tells him that his life has been in some ways unlived because he has always been overshadowed by other lives and other personalities. Yet he has been what is called “fifth business,” a character who is not a major player and yet is necessary to the final recognition. Davies’ novels are deeply influenced by the work of Jung, so that the Deptford trilogy can be seen as exploring the theme of unlived life in light of Jung’s “process of individuation.” The theme of the Deptford Trilogy is that we do not individuate in isolation. My life, lived and unlived, is not the result of a personal choice, or even set of choices, because my life is connected at all points with the lives of others, and we are all affected by one another in myriad ways. It takes three complex novels to unfold the ramifications of a snowball thrown in boyhood—and it wasn’t even the narrator who threw the snowball. His fateful action was to duck, causing the snowball to hit the pregnant woman. The life he was able to live, and the life he was prevented from living up to that point, was determined by that one action. Maybe that is what predestination and karma really mean.

It is doubtless inevitable that the theme of lived and unlived life should end with the subject of love. Are relationships star-crossed, accidents, or choices? Or an interplay of all those factors? The traditional model for marriage has been lifelong monogamy, but, as always, we must ask whether that “morality” exists for the good of the people involved or is a “law” because of a combination of personal possessiveness and the interests of social stability. Can any one person be enough to fulfill the needs of another without some unlived life, some possible other relationship, being repressed into the realm of hidden fantasy? I’m a guy, but I assume that women’s-romance fiction exists to help women deal with their sense of unlived life. Then there are, of course, affairs, whose cause may be no shortcoming of the partner but simply due to a sense of deprivation, the feeling that nobody can be the total fulfillment of another. There are also relationships that are not affairs, but not simple friendships either, deep connections for which society, which can only deal in stereotypes, has no name. These may be uncommon, but are no less precious for all that.

Someone who has known only one relationship may feel romantic claustrophobia. On the other hand, someone who has been in a series of marriages and other relationships, may feel another kind of unlived life. For every relationship that ends leaves one wondering what might have been if it had not failed. There were once possibilities that now will ever be. In addition, all past relationships are a kind of unlived life. “Unlived life” may mean life not yet lived, but it may also mean already lived but still present as a ghostly trace, whether or not the old relationship was a happy one. Yeats has a very strange poem called “An Image from a Past Life.” In it, a lover lays her hands upon her lover’s eyes because “A sweetheart from another life floats there / As though she had been forced to linger / From vague distress / Or arrogant loveliness.” I am not sure what Yeats thought he meant by this image, but someone who comes into a new relationship with a history of past relationships cannot promise the new person that they are the first, the one and only love, in high romantic fashion. Each new love is unique—but they are not the only person one has loved, nor can one usually wish all past loves had never happened, not even for the sake of the person one is with now.

I have no solution to the problem of unlived life. In the face of that incapacity, I take comfort from one of Wallace Stevens’ last poems, called “The Planet on the Table”:

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked....

It was not important that they should survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

That is the life well lived from the point of view of a writer. What of those who do not write? Perhaps the last word lies in a statement from “The Stages of Life”: “The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly” (11), which we may combine with another line from Stevens, “The imperfect is our paradise.” His point is that the imperfect may suffice.

References

Grant, Judith Skelton. Robertson Davies: Man of Myth. Viking, 1994.

Jung, C.G. “The Stages of Life.” In The Portable Jung. Edited by Joseph Campbell. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Viking, 1971.