Philip Roth - Letting Go

I cannot, of course, come to Rachel’s first birthday celebration, what with four months having elapsed since it was held. However, had I been in America in July, near you and your family, I don’t believe I would have come then either. I am not even sure what to make of your having asked me. Nor am I entirely certain why, once having decided to send me an invitation, you sent only the invitation, and no other word, no further remark.

Sitting here, my first thought as to your motive was not pleasant. I saw you standing above me, saying: We have survived, not you. But I can’t hold that image in my mind — nor the image of you fastening the envelope and slipping it into the box for no other reason than to be arrogant. I may be deceiving myself, but I believe what you hoped was that your invitation would catch up with me and inform me, wherever I was, that Rachel was now one year old, and yours — still and for good. That would have been kindness enough, surely, considering how close I brought all of you to an awful end. But your kindness is even larger, is it not? Knowing you, I think: why wouldn’t it be?

However, if this little card you sent is an invitation to be forgiven — for me to feel free to accept your forgiveness — I must say that I am unable to accept. Because I don’t know that I’m properly penitent. And I feel, perhaps wrongly, that this attitude might qualify your forgiveness.

I can’t bring myself yet to ask forgiveness for that night. If you’ve lived for a long while as an indecisive man, you can’t simply forget, obliterate, bury, your one decisive moment. I can’t — in the name of the future, perhaps — accept forgiveness for my time of strength, even if that time was so very brief, and was followed so quickly and humiliatingly by the dissolution of character, of everything. Others — you — may see my decisiveness — my doing something — anything — that! — as born only of desperation, and therefore without value. I, nevertheless, have to wonder about it a little more. You see, I thought at the time that I was sacrificing myself. Whatever broken explanations I offered to others in the days that followed, whatever — I find I cannot finish this sentence.

The rain has slackened and I must go. I don’t believe that for you and me to correspond, on this matter or others, would be beneficial to either of us. But, of course, you are the one who knows that. I take it now that that was why you thought to have your card say nothing, just the time and the place of the event, and its nature. Thank you. It is only kind of you, Libby, to feel that I would want to know that I am off the hook. But I’m not, I can’t be, I don’t even want to be — not until I make some sense of the larger hook I’m on.

Yours ,

Gabe