|
|
 |
 |
|
| Isaiah Berlin, philosopher and historian |
The Forty-One-Year-Old Virgin |
|
|
[As related by biographer Michael Ignatieff] His experience with Patricia [Douglas] might have confirmed him — or imprisoned him — in the role of the sexless bachelor. But instead of marking the end of his erotic life, it was the beginning. For he fell out of love with Patricia in the most efficient of all available ways, by falling in love with someone else. His choice was surprising: a married woman with children, whom he had known since the 1930s. She was a vivacious, attractive, highly intelligent woman of strong political opinions, who had briefly been a communist before the war. Her marriage was enduring but unhappy. She was married to a brilliant, abstracted and otherworldly don. She was adventurous in her sexual life, and one might have expected that it was she who took the initiative. But this was not the case. He took to his bed with a cold in midsummer 1950, and when she came to take care of him, he pulled her down to the bed. She was astonished and then moved that he could display such feelings. For him, the experience undammed a reservoir. The change was complete. At the relatively ripe old age of forty-one, he had begun adult sexual life. They started an intense affair in his college rooms, in her house, in fields and churchyards around Oxford and on one occasion, during their absence, in his parents' house in Hampstead. They had some close scrapes: colleagues, children and friends all came within inches of discovering them, but Isaiah seemed to relish the danger. He was a naive rather than a sentimental lover, eager rather than accomplished, but capable, so she discovered, of intense physical tenderness. Beyond the protective screen of brilliant talk, there was a capacity for intimacy that perhaps not even he had suspected. (Oxford, England, 1950)
from Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff (Viking Penguin, © 1998)
© 2000 Nerve.com, Inc.
|
|
|
|
|
