This chapter focuses on examples of Henry James’s post-1890 writings – including Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and ‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900) – which engage with, or themselves embody, the challenge of commemorating lives cut short prematurely or traumatically. The first half addresses formal and stylistic features and explores how James’s commitment to conserving and commemorating the unspent experiential potential of the dead of the American Civil War manifests within his late aesthetics: informing syntax, notions of character, and the pressure placed on traditional narrative structures. The subsequent sections then trace a competing phenomenon, inspired in part by the author’s meditations on Civil War Monuments: the concern that several of James’s late works (both fictional and non-fictional) display about the wisdom of investing emotionally in the unlived lives of the untimely dead. Together, these sections argue that, during the last twenty-five years of his life, James produced writings at once enthralled by and wary of unfulfilled narrative potential, and attentive to how it might be used to bind epochs together.

This chapter provides some perspectives on decision-making and the role that it should play in your life to be most useful. Specific topics concern the misnomer of “objective decision-making, ” the inappropriateness of trying to optimize your decisions, the appropriate amount of time you should spend making decisions and how that time should be allocated, the importance of avoiding poor life-limiting decisions, the implications of your decisions on an untimely death, and how being spontaneous and enjoying your life fits in with your decision-making. There is also a summary of the types of personal nudges that you can create and use to guide you to make better decisions.