Twin: A Memoir by Shawn Allen

Author:Shawn, Allen [Shawn, Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2010-12-30T05:00:00+00:00

As a child, it had sometimes seemed to me that Mary contained great wisdom that because of some unwritten law she could not divulge. It was comforting to think that she belonged to a purposefully contemplative world, that she was like a monk on a mountaintop in Tibet, or an Indian seer who had taken a vow of silence, living on the streets of Calcutta, observing rituals on behalf of mankind in general. At Harvard, when I thought of Mary, it was as if she had become a mythological figure.

I had been discouraged so often from seeking to know more about her life that I rarely remembered that I wanted to. Sometimes I tried to imagine her experience: having pains or torments for which I had no language and for which, even if I could speak properly, there is no common language; or tried to picture how she viewed her parents, or her brothers, or her own changing body as she aged. I was dimly aware that while she did not understand “my” types of categories, the reverse was also true. She had rules and categories, and no doubt emotions, that I was not privy to.

When I thought of her, I might just as well have been wondering what a bird feels when it sings or when it flies from place to place and makes a decision to land here and not there. How and where does it register its experience of not singing, and then singing; of flying, and then alighting? What are its physical sensations; what are its “thoughts”? How can one enter into the bird’s mind, or imagine its sensations, or what it is like to pay attention to what a bird pays particular attention to, and to ignore what it ignores? But mostly I found it mentally exhausting to continually wonder about Mary, who was, after all, not a bird, but fully human. Mostly, I tried not to think of her.

There is a saying, “Youth is wasted on the young,” which certainly has a ring of truth to it. Yet one would also be justified in saying that only young people are strong enough to survive youth. When I think of the uncertainties and shocks I kept bumping up against in my childhood, which was by any measure a very fortunate one, I wince even now. And when I think of how baffling life must have been for Mary as a child, and of the many layers of terror she must have experienced when she passed from one stage of growing up to another, I am stunned trying to imagine how she tolerated it.

Among the hardships of even a normal youth is never knowing whether what is happening to you, inside or outside, will be a permanent or just a transient experience. If you are jilted by a girl, or you fail an exam, or have become a nervous wreck, or you are sick, you do not yet know if you are doomed to a life of solitude, intellectual failure, chronic anxiety, or illness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.