Thirty Years and a Half

I’ve a friend and he’s a man of letters.  If he recommends a book, I nearly always throw it on my Amazon list.  He recently suggested that his two favorite autobiographies were both very small affairs:  “My Own Life” by David Hume (at 24 pages, it’s more of a pamphlet) and “Autobiography” by John Stuart Mill (a mere 144 pages).  Modest, self-effacing, written when Hume was terminally ill, one quickly develops affinity for the philosopher’s measured pith, in a way I don’t recall having when I last confronted him in an undergraduate philosophy class. 

Meanwhile, ninety-five years later we consider the reflections of another Scotsman.  The prospect of home-schooling always seemed like a rather remarkable responsibility for any parent to take on the fullness of.  John Stuart’s pop, James was not intimidated.  He had John reading Greek when most kids are learning to tie their shoes (aged three) and he proceeds from strength to strength as a young intellect, raised among a cadre of his father’s philosopher friends, like Jeremy Benthem. 

His work as an administrator with the British East India Company and later his career a member of Parliament inform his remarkable, intellectual maturation all of which are fascinating, though it is his love with Harriet Taylor that is perhaps most memorable.  He regarded her as not only his love but his complete intellectual counterpart.  His disruptive work “On the Subjugation of Women” was, as he suggests, cowritten by his wife.   

They endured years of union unwed, while she was still married to her husband and only after twenty-one years, when this man expired, did this odd arrangement mature into a formal marriage.   

Writing, as he is, after her untimely death, seven (and a half!) years after their marriage ceremony, his loss is aching. 

For seven and a half years that blessing was mine: for seven and a half years only!  I can say nothing which would begin to describe even in the faintest manner what that loss was and is.  But because I know that she would have wished it, I endeavor to make the best of what life I have left and to work for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived from thoughts of her and communion with her memory.

. . . and the rest of the accounts of political maneuvering with Disraeli and Walpole and so on, feel almost obligatory, after the dizzying, heartfelt loss of his beloved soulmate. 

I went and dug up the copy of “On Liberty” I had on my shelf, which was published shortly after Harriet’s death and to whom he credits many of the ideas within the text to.  It’s been thirty years, (maybe thirty years and a half?) but I’m looking forward to returning their joint inspiration, with a richer understanding of the text as one-part love letter.

Sunday, 12/30/18