All Directions Are Calling

"Minny died in March, a year after he had last seen her. He was still in England. He felt it as the end of his youth, knowing that death, at the last, was dreadful to her. She would have given anything to live. In the years that followed, he longed to know what she would have thought of his books and stories, and of the decisions he made about his life. This sense of missing her deep and demanding response made itself felt to Gray and Holmes as well, and also to William. All of them wondered in their nervous ambition and great, agitated egotism what Minny would have thought about them or said about them. Henry wondered too what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world which would inevitably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What was once life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose. It was not true to say that Minny Temple haunted him in the years that followed; rather, he haunted her. He conjured up her presence everywhere... He could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened... He could not stop wondering how she would have lived, what she would have done... Both brothers had felt that, at some level, at most levels, narrow life contained no place for her. all her conduct and character, Henry thought, seemed to have pointed to this conclusion -- how profoundly inconsequential, in her history, continued life might have been. Yet Minny was real for him throughout the years... She belonged to the part of him he guarded most fiercely, his hidden self... he let her walk with the power and haunting resonance of an old song echoing through the years, sounding its sad notes to him wherever he went."