Inheritance

I thought of John Keats’s negative capability, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” In this direction lay freedom, and, paradoxically, self-knowledge. By my being willing not to know thoroughly who I am and where I come from, the rigid structures surrounding my identity might begin to give way, leaving behind a sense of openness and possibility

Another trenchant line from the psychoanalyst Bollas: “We learn the grammar of our being before we grasp the rules of our language.” He’s speaking of infancy, of course, and the underpinnings of our psyches

A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

His desire to set a new beginning to the chain of events to which he belonged encountered the same difficulty that it always does: the fact that everybody has a father, that nothing comes first and of itself, its own cause, but that everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down into the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and abysses of the well of the past

The week prior, on Rosh Hashanah, he had sent me a note wishing us L’shana tova tikateivu. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good year. He must have looked it up. He was reaching out a hand, respecting our differences while understanding the enormity of our bond

Later, it will occur to me that Ben Walden felt, to me, like my native country. I had never lived in this country. I had never spoken its language or become steeped in its customs. I had no passport or record of citizenship. Still, I had been shaped by my country of origin all my life, suffused with an inchoate longing to know my own land

It was bewildering to look at him—to see my features reflected back at me. All those staring contests I’d held with myself as a child were about this, I now understood. I had been searching and searching for the truth in the mirror, trying to make sense of my own face. Here it was, finally, irrefutably, in the form of the old man standing before me

It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time.

What if Ben really was resolved to keep the door between us slammed closed? I was an unpleasant aftereffect of an action so inconsequential to him that it didn’t even bear recalling