The Schopenhauer Cure Read online

  Then gradually a solution, a somewhat diabolical solution, began to form in his mind. For some time he had resisted Johanna's pleas for a lengthy tour of Europe. These were difficult times; the international political climate was so unstable that the safety of the Hanseatic cities was threatened and his constant attention to business was required.

  Yet because of weariness and his yearning to shed the weight of business responsibilities, his resistance to Johanna's request was wavering. Slowly there swiveled into mind an inspired plan that would serve two purposes; his wife would be pleased, and the dilemma of Arthur's future would be resolved.

  His decision was to offer his fifteen-year-old son a choice. "You must choose," he told him. "Either accompany your parents on a year's grand tour of all of Europe or pursue a career as a scholar. Either you give me a pledge that on the day you return from the journey you will begin your business apprenticeship or forego this journey, remain in Hamburg, and immediately transfer to a classical educational curriculum which will prepare you for the academic life."

  Imagine a fifteen-year-old facing such a life-altering decision. Perhaps the ever-pedantic Heinrich was offering existential instruction. Perhaps he was teaching his son that alternatives exclude, that for every yes there must be a no. (Indeed, years later Arthur was to write, "He who would be everything cannot be anything.") Or was Heinrich exposing his son to a foretaste of renunciation, that is, if Arthur could not renounce the pleasure of the journey, how could he expect himself to renounce worldly pleasures and live the impecunious life of a scholar?

  Perhaps we are being too charitable to Heinrich. Most likely his offer was disingenuous because he knew that Arthur would not, could not, refuse the trip. No fifteen-year-old could do that in 1803. At that time such a journey was a priceless once-in-a-lifetime event granted only to a privileged few. Before the days of photography, foreign places were known only through sketches, paintings, and published travel journals (a genre, incidentally, that Johanna Schopenhauer was later to exploit brilliantly).

  Did Arthur feel he was selling his soul? Was he tormented by his decision? Of these matters history is silent. We know only that in 1803, in his fifteenth year, he set off with his father, mother, and a servant on a journey of fifteen months throughout all of western Europe and Great Britain. Adele, his six-year-old sister, was deposited with a relative in Hamburg.

  Arthur recorded many impressions in his travel journals written, as his parents required, in the language of the country visited. His linguistic aptitude was prodigious; the fifteen-year-old Arthur was fluent in German, French, and English and had working knowledge of Italian and Spanish. Ultimately, he was to master a dozen modern and ancient languages, and it was his habit, as visitors to his memorial library have noted, to write his marginal notes in the language of each text.

  Arthur's travel journals offer a subtle prefiguring of interests and traits which were aggregating into a persistent character structure. A powerful subtext in the journals is his fascination with the horrors of humanity. In exquisite detail Arthur describes such arresting sights as starving beggars in Westphalia, the masses running in panic from the impending war (the Napoleonic campaigns were incubating), thieves, pickpockets, and drunken crowds in London, marauding gangs in Poitiers, the public guillotine on display in Paris, the six thousand galley slaves, on view as in a zoo, in Toulon doomed to be chained together for life in landlocked naval hulks too decrepit to put out to sea ever again. And he described the fortress in Marseilles, which once housed the Man in the Iron Mask, and the black death museum, where letters from quarantined sections of the city were once required to be dipped into vats of hot vinegar before being passed on. And, in Lyon, he remarked on the sight of people walking indifferently over the very spot where their fathers and brothers were killed during the French Revolution.

  At a boarding school in Wimbledon where Lord Nelson had once been a student in England, Arthur perfected his English and attended public executions and naval floggings, visited hospitals and asylums, and walked by himself through the massive teeming slums of London.

  The Buddha as a young man lived in his father's palace, where the common lot of mankind had been veiled from him. It was only when he first journeyed outside of his father's palace that he saw the three primal horrors of life: a diseased person, a decrepit old man, and a corpse. His discovery of the tragic and terrible nature of existence led the Buddha to his renunciation of the world and the search for a relief from universal suffering.

  For Arthur Schopenhauer, too, early views of suffering profoundly influenced his life and work. The similarity of his experience to that of the Buddha was not lost on him, and years later, when writing about his journey, he said, "In my seventeenth year, without any learned school education, I was gripped by the misery of life, just like Buddha in his youth, when he saw sickness, pain, aging, and death."

  Arthur never had a religious phase; he had no faith but, when young, had a will to faith, a wish to escape the terror of a totally unobserved existence. Had he a belief in the existence of God, though, it would have been sorely tested by his teenaged tour of the horrors of European civilization. At the age of eighteen he wrote, "This world is supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!"

  13

  _________________________

  When, at

  the

  end

  of

  their

  lives, most men look back they

  will find that they have lived

  throughout ad interim. They

  will be surprised to see that

  the very thing they allowed to

  slip

  by

  unappreciated

  and

  unenjoyed was just their life.

  And so a man, having been

  duped by hope, dances into the

  arms of death.

  _________________________

  The trouble with a kitten is that

  Eventually it becomes a cat.

  The trouble with a kitten is that

  Eventually it becomes a cat.

  Jerking his head to dislodge the annoying couplet from his mind, Julius sat up in bed and opened his eyes. It was 6A.M. , a week later, the day of the next group meeting, and those odd Ogden Nash lines looping around in his mind had been the background music for yet another night of unsatisfying sleep.

  Though everyone agrees that life is one goddamned loss after another, few know that one of the most aggravating losses awaiting us in later decades is that of a good night's sleep. Julius knew that lesson all too well. His typical night consisted of tissue-thin dozing which almost never entered the realm of deep, blessed delta-wave slumber, a sleep that was interrupted by so many awakenings that he often dreaded going to bed.

  Like most insomniacs, he awoke in the morning believing either that he had slept far fewer hours than he actually had or that he had been awake all night long. Often he could assure himself that he had slept only by carefully reviewing his nocturnal thoughts and realizing that he would never, in a waking state, have ruminated at such length about such bizarre, irrational things.

  But this particular morning he was entirely confused about how much he had slept.

  The kitten-cat couplet must have emerged from the dream realm, but his other nocturnal thoughts fell into a no-man's-land, with neither the clarity and purposefulness of full-fledged consciousness nor the quirky caprice of dream thoughts.

  Julius sat in bed, reviewing the couplet with his eyes closed, following the instructions he offered patients to facilitate the recall of nighttime fantasies, hypnagogic images, and dreams. The poem was pointed at those who loved kittens but not their coming to age as cats. But what did that have to do with him? He loved kittens and cats alike, had loved the two adult cats in his father's store, loved their kittens and their kittens' kittens, and couldn't understand why the couplet lodged in his mind in such tiresome fashion.

  On second though
t, perhaps the verse was a grim reminder of how, all his life, he had embraced the wrong myth: namely, that everything about Julius Hertzfeld--his fortune, stature, glory--was spiraling upward, and that life would always get better and better. Of course, now he realized that the reverse was true--that the couplet had it right--that the golden age came first, that his innocent, kittenly beginnings, the playfulness, the hide-and-seek, the capture-the-flag games, and the building of forts out of the empty liquor boxes in his father's store, while unburdened by guilt, guile, knowledge, or duty, was the very best time of life and that as the days and years passed, the intensity of his flame dimmed, and existence grew inexorably more grim. The very worst was saved for last. He recalled Philip's words about childhood in the last meeting.

  No doubt about it: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had that part right.

  Julius nodded his head sadly. It was true he had never truly savored the moment, never grasped the present, never said to himself, "This is it, this time, this day--this is what I want! These are the good old days, right now. Let me remain in this moment, let me take root in this place for all time." No, he had always believed that the juiciest meat of life was yet to be found and had always coveted the future--the time of being older, smarter, bigger, richer. And then came the upheaval, the time of the great reversal, the sudden and cataclysmic deidealization of the future, and the beginning of the aching yearning for what used to be.

  When was that reversal? When did nostalgia replace the golden promise of tomorrow? Not in college, where Julius considered everything as prelude (and obstacle) to that grand prize: admission to medical school. Not in medical school, where, in his first years, he yearned to be out of the classrooms and onto the wards as a clinical clerk, with white jacket and stethoscope hanging out of pocket or slung casually about his neck like a steel-and-rubber shawl. Not in the clerkships of his third and fourth medical school years, when he finally took his place on the wards. There he yearned for more authority--to be important, to make vital clinical decisions, to save lives, to dress in blue scrubs and careen a patient on a gurney down the corridor to the OR to perform emergency trauma surgery. Not even when he became chief resident in psychiatry, peeked behind the curtain of shamanism, and was stunned at the limits and uncertainty of his chosen profession.

  Without doubt Julius's chronic and persistent unwillingness to grasp the present had played havoc with his marriage. Though he had loved Miriam from the moment he laid eyes on her in the tenth grade, he simultaneously resented her as an obstacle blocking him from the multitude of women he felt entitled to enjoy. He had never completely acknowledged that his mate-search was over or that his freedom to follow his lust was in the slightest way curtailed. When his internship began he found that the house staff sleeping quarters were immediately adjacent to the nursing school dorm brimming with nubile young nurses who adored doctors. It was a veritable candy store, and he stuffed himself with a rainbow of flavors.

  It was only after Miriam's death that the reversal must have occurred. In the ten years since the car crash took her from him, he had cherished her more than while she was alive. Julius sometimes heaved with despair when he thought of how his lush contentment with Miriam, the true idyllic soaring moments of life, had come and gone without his fully grasping them. Even now, after a decade, he could not speak her name quickly but had to pause after each syllable. He knew also that no other woman would ever really matter to him. Several women temporarily dispelled his loneliness, but it didn't take long for him, and for them, to realize they would never replace Miriam. More recently, his loneliness was attenuated by a large circle of male friends, several of whom belonged to his psychiatric support group, and by his two children. For the past few years he had taken all his vacations en famille with his two children and five grandchildren.

  But all these thoughts and reminiscences had been only nocturnal trailers and short subjects--the main feature of the night's mentation had been a rehearsal of the speech he would deliver to the therapy group later that afternoon.

  He had already gone public about his cancer to many of his friends and his individual therapy patients, yet, curiously, he was painfully preoccupied with his "coming out" in the group. Julius thought it had something to do with his being in love with his therapy group. For twenty-five years he had looked forward eagerly to every meeting.

  The group was more than a clump of people; it had a life of its own, an enduring personality. Though none of the original members (except, of course, he himself) was still in the group, it had a stable persisting self, a core culture (in the jargon, a unique set of "norms"--unwritten rules) that seemed immortal. No one member could recite the group norms, but everyone could agree whether a certain piece of behavior was appropriate or inappropriate.

  The group demanded more energy than any other event of his week, and Julius had labored mightily to keep it afloat. A venerable mercy ship, it had transported a horde of tormented people into safer, happier harbors. How many? Well, since the average stay was between two and three years, Julius figured at least a hundred passengers. From time to time, memories of departed members wafted through his mind, snippets of an interchange, a fleeting visual image of a face or incident. Sad to think that these wisps of memory were all that remained of rich vibrant times, of events bursting with so much life, meaning, and poignancy.

  Many years ago Julius had experimented with videotaping the group and playing back some particularly problematic interchanges at the next meeting. These old tapes were in an archaic format no longer compatible with contemporary video playback equipment. Sometimes he fancied retrieving them from his basement storage room, having them converted, and bringing departed patients back to life again. But he never did; he couldn't bear exposing himself to proof of the illusory nature of life, how it was warehoused on shiny tape and how quickly the present moment and every moment to come will fade into the nothingness of electromagnetic wavelets.

  Groups require time to develop stability and trust. Often a new group will spin off members who are unable, for reasons of either motivation or ability, to engage in the group task (that is, interacting with other members and analyzing that interaction). Then it may go through weeks of uneasy conflict as members jockey for position of power, centrality, and influence, but eventually, as trust develops, the healing atmosphere grows in strength. His colleague, Scott, had once likened a therapy group to a bridge built in battle. Many casualties (that is, dropouts) had to be taken during the early formative stage, but once the bridge was built it conveyed many people--the remaining original members and all those who subsequently joined the group--to a better place.

  Julius had written professional articles about the various ways that therapy groups helped patients, but he always had difficulty in finding the language to describe the truly crucial ingredient: the group's healing ambience. In one article he likened it to dermatological treatments of severe skin lesions in which the patient was immersed into soothing oatmeal baths.

  One of the major side benefits of leading a group--a fact never stated in the professional literature--is that a potent therapy group often heals the therapist as well as the patients. Though Julius had often experienced personal relief after a meeting, he never was certain of the precise mechanism. Was it simply a result of forgetting himself for ninety minutes, or of the altruistic act of therapy, or of enjoying his own expertise, feeling proud of his abilities, and enjoying the high regard of others? All of the above?

  Julius gave up trying to be precise and for the past few years accepted the folksy explanation of simply dipping into the healing waters of the group.

  Going public with his melanoma to his therapy group seemed a momentous act. It was one thing, he thought, to be open with family, friends, and all the other folks residing backstage, but quite another to unmask himself to his primary audience, to that select group for whom he had been healer, doctor, priest, and shaman. It was an irreversible step, an admission that he was superannuated, a public confessio
n that his life no longer spiraled upward toward a bigger, brighter future.

  Julius had been thinking a good bit of the missing member, Pam, now traveling and not due to return for a month. He regretted she would not be there today for his disclosure. For him, she was the key member of the group, always a comforting, healing presence for others--and for him as well. And he felt chagrined by the fact that the group had not been able to help with her extreme rage and obsessional thinking about her husband and an ex-lover and that Pam, in desperation, had sought help at a Buddhist meditation retreat in India.

  And so, heaving and churning with all these feelings, Julius entered the group room at four-thirty that afternoon. The members were already seated and poring over sheets of paper which were whisked out of sight when Julius entered.

  Odd, he thought. Was he late? He took a quick look at his watch. Nope, four-thirty on the dot. He put it out of mind and began the recitation of his prepared statement.

  "Well, let's get started. As you know, I never make a practice of starting the meeting, but today's an exception because there's something I need to get off my chest, something that's hard for me to say. So here goes.

  "About a month ago I learned that I have a serious, I'll be frank, more than serious--a life-threatening form of skin cancer, malignant melanoma. I thought I was in good health; this turned up at a recent routine physical exam...."

  Julius stopped. Something was off kilter: The members' facial expression and nonverbal language weren't right. Their posture was wrong. They should have been turned toward him; focusing on him; instead no one fully faced him, no one met his gaze, all eyes were averted, unfocused, except for Rebecca, who covertly studied the sheet of paper in her lap.

  "What's happening?" asked Julius. "I feel like I'm not making contact. You all seem preoccupied with something else today. And, Rebecca, what is it that you're reading?"