On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, by Andrew H. Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives by Andrew H. Miller David LaRocca (bio) On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, by Andrew H. Miller; pp. xvii + 207. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020, $31.00, £24.95. "Lit by sly wonders," On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives is Andrew H. Miller's marvelous, melancholic, middle-aged meditation on the meaning of lives unled (183). One attribute of the human condition that we appear to know, at least from a scientific perspective, is that an individual has but one life—often measured by the mere fact of a body's duration in time and space. Yet we also have a sense—an inkling—that, within such singularity, one could have made other choices, not taken the path one did (what we call personal history). This fact of limitation and this impression of freedom are the consolidated motivating force behind Miller's book: I could have done otherwise than I did; indeed, there were many choices to make. At this point, your personal ontology will determine the extent to which Miller's book will grip you. In scenes of reading defined by a paratactic style, Miller largely sidesteps the aid of philosophers and wisdom literature that reflects on freedom and fate (though Stanley Cavell appears as a patron saint of the endeavor, and has the book's final word)—turning instead, earnestly and wistfully, to a series of vignettes on the arts, principally movies, short stories, novels, poems, and paintings. With these resources at hand, including Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (1916), Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" (1908), Carl Dennis's "The God Who Loves You" (2001), Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Miller shows us how alternate paths, unled lives, and counterfactuals are human preoccupations, especially for artists called to reflect on our vexing condition. Yet to what extent is the premise of an "unled life" viable as more than a compelling structure for artistic invention? The works of art upon which Miller dwells give words, [End Page 466] pictures, and sounds for addressing the drama of an inner life spent (more for some than others) engulfed mindlessly in anxiety and doubt, tormented by negative emotions, toggling between "regret and relief": wishing things had been otherwise or being grateful that they were not (or were not worse) (96). Does the mere belief in "unled lives"—with its focus on what did not happen—cultivate ugly feelings? Regret and relief are both predicated on the conviction that one could have done or chosen differently. In short, both mental gestures—and the varied emotions that track them—take for granted that humans are, to some extent or other, free. Some ethicists pick up this supposition in their formulations of culpability, responsibility, and moral choice, while others probe the countermanding notion of moral luck. Who wants to say that a person chooses to be a refugee, a climate migrant, an orphan, diseased, or homeless? If we are fated, there is no reason to regret (or to feel relieved) because things could not have been otherwise than they are. As art is ever an accomplice to philosophical insight, it is no wonder that Miller's careful study should provide counsel for existential and phenomenological matters, as well as moral ones. Why are such thoughts especially poignant at middle age, as Miller suggests? Because one has made enough decisions, done enough to regret, to wonder after "untaken" paths. Yet, caught up in that middlescence mindset, one wonders: could other paths really have been taken? There is no way to disprove or dispute the course of one's history as one's own; counterfactuals persist as speculative fictions (for example, if T. S. Eliot did not catch a cold and had instead visited Woolf, would she still have committed suicide?). Alas, regret and relief are epiphenomena of a private faith in freedom. Though Miller presumes free agency, his observations are plaintive, often somber. Meanwhile, mechanistic, deterministic, and fatalistic valences are left aside, as are the practitioners...