The Memoirs of a Failure: with an Account of the Man and His ManuscriptKittredge, Daniel Wright
Science
The Memoirs of a Failure: with an Account of the Man and His Manuscript
Kittredge, Daniel Wright
Failure (Psychology) -- Fiction; Harvard University -- Fiction; University of Virginia -- Fiction
I repeat that I am unable to state his meaning, though I believe
that the man had something to say. Perhaps if I should force myself
to phrase a hypothetical meaning, I might say that the difference
between happiness and unhappiness is the difference between positive
and negative thoughts. Positive thoughts are constructive. And Dunlevy
unconsciously illustrates by means of his own personality that he
cherished negative thoughts, and was therefore a negative man. But
Dunlevy does not allow us to dismiss him with the trite conclusion that
because sentiments are personal, they are necessarily autobiographical.
He makes us go further, and asks: “Why should I have been a failure? I
admit that it was because I had a weak will. But how did it happen that
my will was weak? Does the onus of the blame fall upon my ancestors and
myself or upon civilization?” He makes both share the responsibility,
but he brings his stronger indictment against our civilization; because
he proves that he started out with clean instincts and a desire to do
good. This is the only way that I can account for his writing two such
papers as the one in which he introduces the Strange Professor, and
the other in which he writes as a little child, side by side. In the
former, he shows himself on the very verge of acute insanity, fighting
to save the control of his reason; and in the latter, he shows that he
had it also in him to lie awake in the dark and ponder that once he
was not so, that once he was “a little brown-headed boy, unfettered
with the knowledge of evil,” and with the potentialities of goodness
and deep affection in him, and of a decent ambition to amount to some
one. Two such papers as these were actually found by me written side by
side in his manuscript book; and I noted that the calm, saner one was
written after the other.
No, no, it will not do to dismiss Dunlevy as a bitter, bad-minded
egoist. No, no, that will not do. The man was utterly dissatisfied with
the outcome of his life. You can be no more disgusted with him than
he is disgusted with himself. And if there be truth in the main drift
of his contention, what boots it whether he was sane or insane? He
believed in the Omnipotence of Truth, no matter how much we, transitory
atoms, try to cloud Truth by befogging each other and hoodwinking
ourselves.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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