Atdtda27: History has flowed in, 748-750

[Paul Nightingale]

Yashmeen’s letter to Auberon Halfcourt, whom she addresses as ‘father’. Cf.
Fleetwood Vibe’s journal in Ch12 (138ff). If Fleetwood produces a subjective
account that might or might not be intended for other readers, Yashmeen
cannot be sure if her letter will reach its intended target. She can name
the “unexpressed term” (749), but then acknowledges that, where the T.W.I.T.
is concerned, she herself is an unspoken (“... only they can say--but will
not”). Indeed, she might no longer exist: “... among whom, I fear, I am no
longer counted” (749). Nonetheless, if the T.W.I.T. will not speak to her,
she describes mathematics “as a revelation”, ie it has spoken to her and
“once seemed the way”: no longer, then? One might think back a few pages to
Kit’s own doubts regarding his vocation, his “exclusion from what had been
spoken of at Yale as a ‘future’” (745). For Yashmeen here mathematics is
inseparable from the influence of McTaggart; Kit of course has had to deal
with Scarsdale Vibe.

Kit carries the letter to Auberon Halfcourt, and therefore stands in for
Yashmeen. By the end of the letter she has tied herself to him (eg, “...
like myself, [he] journeys at the mercy of Forces ...” etc, 750); however,
if “[h]e is not my ‘other self’, yet in some way I feel that he is my
brother”. She has previously said that “History has flowed in to surround us
all” (748): cf. Kit on “the forces of History” on 739.

Yashmeen herself stands in for any daughter that Halfcourt might or might
not have had, and suggests (speaking to Kit in Gottingen) that he brought
her into being, so to speak: “My true memories do not begin until the moment
he first saw me in the market ...” (596). On that occasion she insists her
“other family have gone on to destinies I cannot imagine”, are therefore
elusive, her sense of self defined by Halfcourt. To ‘invent’ a brother is to
offer a narrative beyond Halfcourt’s reckoning. She has already indicated a
source of conflict with Halfcourt (“... more and more lately, I find I
cannot set aside your profession ...” etc, 749), his “strictest vow of
Silence” following on the non-speech of the T.W.I.T. If once she called him
her “second father” (595), she concludes the letter by describing “a strange
doubleness to my life” (750), one that might effectively erase his
intervention in the bazaar: she remains on “the same ancient road of
abasement”.

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