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PARTISAN REVIEW
my twin, were profound and catastrophic. In the latter instance, it
was as if I had made a stone image and then broke it; but whether
the breaking was to bring good luck or bad I was not to know. The
first of these events put an end to a strangely muted but obsessive
kind of search. The second instigated a very different kind of one, a
search for no guerdon, a mission toward no ultimate showdown,
whether of real or figurative battle, a recircling journey toward no
home. It was rather a. search whose sea-voyages and treks inland,
whose bookings and arrangements, whose map-readings and takings
of stock, all occurred in the domain of questionings. Like some topo–
logical game requiring the player to move on a board through as
many points as possible, this domain into which I had been thrust to
live my moral life caused me to do so not by traversing the field, but
to live among the questions and doubts that blossomed everywhere,
wherever an answer fell.
But questions of the kind one would think might nag at me fell
away long ago, questions about
him,
and what "actually" happened.
The questions I live with are all about
me,
and about
it
(or
everything else). And even what might appear to be a terminal or
limiting question about all that (the years in which he was part of my
life went by fifteen years ago)- What if he were not
your
double, but
a double of some twin brother of yours, from whom you might have
been separated, say, in infancy, a twin brother whom this person en–
countered once in the way he did you, a twin brother whom he
either killed, or, more likely, caused to abandon him, and so
forth?- even
that
question no longer looms up before me like a
menacing indeterminacy along a forest road on a moonless night. It
simply stands, like a funny rock formation at the far end of a field,
more or less visible and more or less problematic in its possible
figuration, depending upon the weather.
John Hollander is Professor ofEnglish and Director of Graduate English
Studies at Yale University. His last book of poems,
Powers of Thirteen,
was published in 1983 by Atheneum.
