John Hollander
THE TWIN'S STORY
My twin brother and I had been placed in different fami–
lies shortly after birth, and although I had known of his existence,
we never met until we were both in pur early thirties . I grew up in the
city, he in the country, although the effects of this in our two natures
were not what you might think. For by that time our cities had
already become what they are today- had lost their cosmopolitan
character and had become massed villages, enclosures rather than
confluences. The country had lost its innocence, but of course l).ad
never acquired the generous skepticism, the joy in the multiplicities
of life's versions, that the cities once engendered- wide as its ex–
posure to nature was, the country afforded only a narrow window
onto human variety.
Well, then. My brother and I, different as our circumstances
were, finally met by some peculiar combination of chance and de–
sign. My parents-or rather, my foster parents, for my true mother
and father had been killed in a grisly and meaningless accident a few
months after my birth- had spoken of a twin brother who had been
taken away by distant relatives. But they had so casually managed to
dampen my natural curiosity, by means that I can now barely
manage to understand, that the details of the question never seemed
to matter. Perhaps I had been encouraged to feel that any attempt to
discover or encounter this brother would end in disaster, or that it
would be extraordinarily unseemly. In any event, I never felt much
interest in pursuing the problem. But this did not prevent me from
taking great comfort in the notion-even when I was very young–
that there existed somewhere in the world a strange kind of comple–
tion of my body and my consciousness. Although I was apparently
finished off- with no missing limbs, nor palpable deficiencies of
sense or metabolism or whatever that might need correction- I
alone knew and felt that, actual encounter or proximity aside, an
embodiment of the rest of me- rather than
more
of me- was part of
the available universe, and that he- who-and-wherever he was–
stood as some ultimately redemptive being for any missing element
or quality of which even I might be unaware. I grew so used to the
feeling of security to which this notion gave rise that I would leave it
undisturbed even by meditation.
