Lilli de Jong by Janet Benton

Author:Janet Benton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Fifth Month 18, near midnight

I ought not to read so late—but I’ve opened On Liberty and come upon an idea that seems to turn Mill’s other ideas on their heads.

We can pursue our true wants, Mill writes, only when doing so harms no one to whom we are obliged.

Of course this must be so. To behave otherwise would be immoral. Yet how it changes everything!

I am obliged to Charlotte.

The freedom I seek is to remain her mother, in word and deed.

I have harmed her in seeking this. Only because of prejudice, though—only because of prejudice.

Mill wishes to do away with such limiting judgments. Yet with it present, infecting our world, the promise of his idea of liberty belongs only to those whose survival is unaffected by narrow minds. That is, it belongs to those who have little need of earning money, and not only that; it belongs to those of that group who are essential to the survival of none.

How many are there of these persons—uncommonly removed from their fellows—who may press against the walls of common morality? The most of us are saddled with near-constant obligations: raising the young and sheltering the crippled, doing farming and manufacturing, tending the sick, lowering the dead to their graves. Does Mill realize just how few can take this liberty he trumpets?

There may be cruelty in such a philosophy. It posits a world we cannot occupy—and makes us feel doubly trapped for knowing it.

But I won’t blame Mill for this. He must have known the sting of prejudice and had his own life narrowed, or else how has he understood its hazards and its costs?

In the philosophy of Friends, one seeks comfort in the Lord when humans fail to understand one’s revolutionary aims.

If only my aims were considered revolutionary.

If only I could speak with Mill and arrive with him at a more practical form of liberty. For we take our steps through this world linked arm to arm, affecting one another. Mustn’t we all accept a partial freedom, a limited but not obscured horizon?

Another idea begins to tickle my mind. It starts with this: I can be considered free only if I can choose.

And what do my choices matter, if they’re of no consequence to someone else?

Then only because my choices affect others can I be called free!

There is no such thing as liberty, then, if I am not obligated.

Yet if I’m obligated, then I am not free.

I’ve wound my thinking into knots. I need to sleep.

Rain is dashing into the oval window at the foot of my bed. Down the street, in the moonlight, a patchwork of blooming trees and bushes glows. A splendid scene. Yet as I watch, the wind and rain are liberating flower after flower from their stems and hurtling them to piles of rotting petals.

Does all beauty end in rot?

Late night is the playground of despair.

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