Dear Brutus and Nostalgia Destruction

When I started a post yesterday, it was going to be Part 94 of the Nostalgia Destruction Tour. You can bet the Nostalgia Tour turning into the NDT will be in the Wyman Family Christmas Letter 2023 (which we have already started). I had an office-mate Jon, who years ago told me that the superpower you dream about says a lot about your personality. I confessed that mine was time travel, and he nodded "That probably means you have decisions you have regretted." That is most certainly true. I go back and get things Less Wrong This Time. Oddly, it is usually framed in the negative, of a course I should not have bothered to take, a job I should not have taken, a girl I should not have dated. Sometimes the positive idea comes in, as I think "I should have...," but mostly it's an Eeyorish "I should not have..." I am sure this says something unhealthy about my character, though I am not sure what.

But it's all lies anyway, even if it is useful in understanding myself and others, and is otherwise rather harmless reverie. I think I have mentioned that I tend to view the past like an old photo album in the attic, which usually means only the pleasant bits. "That's Auntie Em there on the left...and oh look! There's Toto!" Going to old places and talking with old friends, sometimes "friends," these last three years has been that out of me pretty well. A few people are as I remembered, or better.  But most of you...

Solzhenitsyn's phrase "Live Not by Lies" came into my head, though, so the destruction tour is doing its work.  Though it is a political phrase, it applies at least as well to personal affairs. The lies are usually in the direction of inflating the self, which interferes with our forgiving others. We come up against that wall often enough, having overlooked or explained away as much as we can of another person's behavior, still angry that "They were just wrong. They should never have done that to me.  They deserve to be told." We forgive because we are also sinners and have been forgiven.  Without that we marinate in our juices forever.

So I listened to the stories and often thought "Y'know, I think I'm glad I didn't do a hybrid major after all," or "if I had hung out with him more I would have picked up a lot of this attitude," and have frequently come from a bit of correspondence and said to my wife "I am so glad I married you." So it was with a bit of a chuckle that I thought "What if God granted me this gift and I went back and changed nothing? That would make a good story." Then I realised that this was already part of a story, James Barrie's "Dear Brutus," and I had already written about it. In a magical wood that appears on Midsummer's Eve, a select group gets to see glimpses of what life would have been like had they made one major decision differently. A key line below is "One lovely older couple comes back from a nice walk in the wood, having seen nothing surprising." They would not have made the decision differently, or it didn't matter anyway. It didn't matter anyway...would things have ended up about the same for us, or would small butterfly flappings have changed everything?

When I first wrote this I was struck by the beautiful poignancy.  I now have a grimmer view, which you can find at the end

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Reposted from June 2019, slightly edited.

Sir J.M. Barrie wrote female characters beloved by women and girls, which is odd, because he doesn't seem to have known real-world women well. At least, his relationships with them were troubled. He was not his mother's favorite son, and when the favorite died in a skating accident, James tried to become the missing boy - including not growing older. Barrie later told the story that his mother had said with some excitement as he walked past her door "Is that you?" To which he replied "No, it's no' him.  It's only me." We know now how memory plays us false, and don't know what was actually said.  We do know that was the adult J.M. Barrie's forever impression of what was said.

He had no children of his own, sons or daughter.  When he adopted five boys whose parents had died, he did not get along with the nanny who continued to care for them, as specified in the will.

James wed a young actress, but it was believed the marriage was never consummated.* She eventually had an affair with a younger man and refused to break it off at Barrie's demand.  He eventually divorced her, but supported her the rest of her life anyway. In a poignant, theatrical gesture, he delivered the money every year at a private dinner on their wedding anniversary.

Poignant. He had a gift for poignancy in scenes involving women. Generations of girls and women have teared up when Peter Pan flies out the window at the end and Wendy says "If another little girl- if one younger than I am -- Oh, Peter, how I wish I could take you up and squdge you!" I was in a production in college and I still shiver to remember it. That is only the beginning with Barrie's plays.  In  "The Old Lady Shows Her Medals" a childless woman envies the ladies of her circle talking about their sons away at the war, so she finds the name of one with her surname and starts to write to him. When he returns, he comes to meet her, and it turns out he has lost his mother. Though it is all a comedy, then scene has considerable power.  In "The Twelve-Pound Look" an oppressive man hires a typist on the eve of his Knighthood to type the messages of congratulation, who turns out to be the wife who left him years ago once she had saved up the price of a typewriter to support herself. Twelve pounds. (At the end of the play, the second wife, about to become Lady Sims, asks upon hearing the story what the cost of a typewriter is.)  In "Quality Street" a woman pretends to be her own niece to flirt with and hopefully win a previous suitor of her own, back from the war. 

Perhaps it is only sentimentality that Sir James was good at and these women are not actually well-drawn believable characters.  Sentimentality usually depends on the reader bringing a lot to the character from their own lives and experience. Still, I find them moving even though I have zero experience being female myself.

I thought of "Dear Brutus" today as I watched a young woman at a store pause to tie up her hair to fit under a hat before going out into the rain. The play is set in an English country house on Midsummer's Eve - as we are just a few days past that it may have been lurking in my mind - and the characters we immediately meet are mostly unlikable.  They rather transparently blame others for the unhappiness in their lives, and the others are present. The host, presumably Puck in disguise,  invites a different group every year on the rumor of a magical wood appearing nearby. The characters all enter, and each sees something of what life would have been if they had made one great decision differently. There is a scene which I did in acting class where one man encounters a 15 year-old girl who he knows at a glance would have been his daughter, because of her strong resemblance to a woman who would have been her mother.  The girl speaks to him in an everyday manner, because to her this is just one day among many with her father. He however, stares at her with aching heart, knowing this is the only time he will ever see her. She asks if he likes her hair better up or down. He is unable to answer, but can eventually control himself enough to tell her she looks wonderful both ways.

I could act the part more convincingly now than I could when I was 20.

One lovely older couple comes back from a nice walk in the wood, having seen nothing surprising.  The title comes from Julius Caesar, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves."

*That single suspicion, plus his adopting the Davies boys when their parents died, is the entire evidence for the idea that he was a pedophile. It was made nearly out of whole cloth by a biographer decades later.  One of the five Davies boys was still alive at the time and scoffed at the idea.

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Back to 2023. I now see the scene with the daughter as more of a horror element. For the rest of his life the man will be haunted by her, and know that he consigned her to non-existence. Who could endure it?