The Schopenhauer Cure Page 12

  "There, it's out."

  "And on the agenda for next week," said Julius, rising to signal the end of the meeting.

  14

  1807--How

  Arthur

  Schopenhauer

  Almost Became

  a Merchant

  _________________________

  Aperson of high, rare mental

  gifts who is forced into a job

  which is merely useful is like

  a valuable vase decorated with

  the most beautiful painting

  and then used as a kitchen

  pot.

  _________________________

  The Schopenhauer family's grand tour ended in 1804, and the sixteen-year-old Arthur, with a heavy heart, honored his pledge to his father by commencing his seven-year apprenticeship with Senator Jenisch, an eminent Hamburg merchant. Slipping into a double life, Arthur fulfilled all the quotidian tasks of his apprenticeship but surreptitiously spent every spare moment studying the great ideas of intellectual history.

  He had so internalized his father, however, that these stolen moments filled him with remorse.

  Then, nine months later came the staggering event that marked Arthur's life forever. Though Heinrich Schopenhauer was only sixty-five, his health had rapidly deteriorated: he appeared jaundiced, fatigued, depressed, and confused, often not recognizing old acquaintances. On the twentieth of April, 1805, he managed, despite his infirmity, to travel to his Hamburg warehouse, slowly climb to the upper loft of the granary, and hurl himself out of the window into the Hamburg Canal. A few hours later his body was found floating in the icy water.

  Every suicide leaves a wake of shock, guilt, and anger in the survivors, and Arthur experienced all these sentiments. Imagine the complexity of feelings Arthur must have experienced. His love for his father resulted in intense grief and loss. His resentment of his father--later he often spoke of his suffering from his father's excessive hardness--

  evoked remorse. And the wonderful possibility of liberation must have evoked much guilt: Arthur realized that his father would have forever blocked the path to his becoming a philosopher. In this regard one thinks of two other great freethinking moral philosophers, Nietzsche and Sartre, who lost their fathers early in life. Could Nietzsche have become the Antichrist if his father, a Lutheran minister, had not died when Nietzsche was a child? And in his autobiography Sartre expresses his relief that he was not burdened with the search for his father's approbation. Others, Kierkegaard and Kafka, for example, were not so fortunate: all their lives they were oppressed by the weight of their fathers' judgment.

  Though Arthur Schopenhauer's work contains an enormous range of ideas, topics, historical and scientific curiosities, notions, and sentiments, there are to be found only a couple of personal tender passages, and each pertains to Heinrich Schopenhauer. In one passage Arthur expresses pride in his father's honest admission that he was in business to make money and compares his father's forthrightness to the duplicity of many of his fellow philosophers (particularly Hegel and Fichte), who grasp for wealth, power, and fame all the while pretending they are working for humanity.

  At the age of sixty he planned to dedicate his complete works to the memory of his father. He worked and reworked the wording of his dedication, which ultimately was never published. One version began: "Noble, excellent spirit to whom I owe everything that I am and that I achieve...any one finding in my work any kind of joy, consolation, instruction, let him hear your name and know that, if Heinrich Schopenhauer had not been the man he was, Arthur Schopenhauer would have perished a hundred times."

  The strength of Arthur's filial devotion remains puzzling, given Heinrich's lack of any overt affection toward his son. His letters to Arthur are laced with criticism. For example: "Dancing and riding do not make for a livelihood for a merchant whose letters have to be read and must therefore be well written. Now and then I find that the capital letters in your hand are still veritable monstrosities." Or: "Do not acquire a round back, which looks ghastly.... if in the dining room one catches sight of someone stooping, one takes him for a disguised tailor or cobbler." In his very last letter Heinrich instructed his son: "With reference to walking and sitting upright, I advise you request everyone you are with to give you a blow whenever you are caught oblivious of this great matter. This is what children of Princes have done, not minding the pain for a short time, rather than appear as oafs all their lives."

  Arthur was his father's son, resembling him not only physically but temperamentally. When he was seventeen, his mother wrote him: "I know too well how little you had of a happy sense of youth, how large the disposition for melancholic brooding you received as a sad share of your inheritance from your father."

  Arthur also inherited his father's deep sense of integrity, which played a decisive role in the dilemma that confronted him following his father's death: should he stay in the apprenticeship even though he hated the world of commerce? Eventually, he decided to do what his father would have done: honor his pledge.

  He wrote of his decision, "I continued to hold my position with my merchant patron, partly because my excessive grief had broken the energy of my spirit, partly because I would have had a guilty conscience were I to rescind my father's decision so soon after his death."

  If Arthur felt immobilized and duty-bound after his father's suicide, his mother had no such inclinations. With the speed of a whirlwind she changed her entire life. In a letter to the seventeen-year-old Arthur she wrote: "Your character is so completely different from mine: you are by nature undecided, I myself am too fast, too resolute." After a few months of widowhood she sold the Schopenhauer mansion, liquidated the venerable family business, and moved away from Hamburg. She boasted to Arthur, "I will always choose the most exciting option. Consider my choice of residence: instead of moving to my hometown, back to my friends and relatives, like every other woman would have done in my stead, I chose Weimar, which was almost unknown to me."

  Why Weimar? Johanna was ambitious and yearned to be close to the epicenter of German culture. Supremely confident of her social abilities, she knew she could make good things happen, and, indeed, within months she had created an extraordinary new life for herself: she established the liveliest salon of Weimar and developed a close friendship with Goethe and many other leading writers and artists. Soon she began a career, first as a successful writer of travel journals chronicling the Schopenhauer family's tour and a trip to southern France; then, with Goethe's urging, she turned to fiction and wrote a series of romantic novels. She was one of the first truly liberated women and was Germany's first woman to earn her living as a writer. For the next decade Johanna Schopenhauer became a renowned novelist, the Danielle Steel of nineteenth-century Germany, and for decades Arthur Schopenhauer was known only as "Johanna Schopenhauer's son." In the late 1820s Johanna's complete works were published in a twenty-volume edition.

  Though history (based greatly on Arthur's scathing criticism of his mother) has generally presented Johanna as narcissistic and uncaring, there is no doubt that she, and only she, liberated Arthur from his servitude and started him on his way to philosophy.

  The instrument of delivery was a fateful letter she wrote to Arthur in April 1807, two years after his father's suicide.

  Dear Arthur,

  The serious and calm tone of your March 28th letter, flowing from your mind into my mind, woke me up and revealed that you might be on your way to totally missing your vocation! That is why I have to do each and every thing to save you, however possible; I know what it means to live a life repugnant to one's soul; and if it is possible, I will spare you, my dear son, this misery. Oh, dear dear Arthur, why was it that my voice counted so little; what you want now, was in fact then my warmest wish; how hard I strove to make it happen, despite everything one said against me....

  if you do not wish to be taken into the honourable Philistine order, I, my dear Arthur, truly don't want to put any obstacle into your way; it is
just you who have to seek your own way and choose it. Then I will advise and help, where and how I can. First try to come to peace with yourself... remember you must choose studies that promise you a good salary, not only because it is the only way you can live, for you will never be rich enough to live from your inheritance alone. If you have made your choice, tell me so, but you have to take this decision on your own.... If you feel the strength and heart to do this, I will willingly give you my hand. But just don't imagine life as a complete learned man to be too delightful. I now see it around me, dear Arthur. It is a tiring, troublesome life full of work; only the delight in doing it gives it its charm.

  One doesn't get rich with it; as a writer, one acquires with difficulty what one needs for survival.... To make your life as a writer you have to be able to produce something excellent.... now, more than ever, there is a need of brilliant heads. Arthur, think about it carefully, and choose, but then stay firm; let your perseverance never fail, and you will safely achieve your goal. Choose what you want...but with tears in my eyes I implore you: do not cheat on yourself. Treat yourself seriously and honestly. The welfare of your life is at stake, as well as the happiness of my old days; because only you and Adele can hopefully replace my lost youth. I couldn't bear it to know that you are unhappy, especially if I had to blame myself for having let this great misfortune happen to you out of my too large pliability. You see, dear Arthur, that I dearly love you, and that I want to help you in everything. Reward me by your confidence and by, having once made up your mind, following my advice in fulfilling your choice. And don't hurt me by rebelliousness. You know that I am not stubborn. I know how to give way by arguments, and I will never demand anything from you I won't be able to support by arguments....

  Adieu, dear Arthur, the post is urgent and my fingers hurt. Bear in mind all I send and write to you, and answer soon.

  Your mother

  J. Schopenhauer

  In his old age Arthur wrote, "When I finished reading this letter I shed a flood of tears." By return mail he opted for liberation from his apprenticeship, and Johanna responded, "That you have so quickly come to a decision, against your wont, would disquiet me in anyone else. I should fear rashness; with you it reassures me, I regard it as the power of your innermost desires that drives you.'

  Johanna wasted no time; she notified Arthur's merchant patron and his landlord that Arthur was leaving Hamburg, she organized his move and arranged for him to attend a gymnasium in Gotha, fifty kilometers from his mother's home in Weimar.

  Arthur's chains were broken.

  15

  Pam in India

  _________________________

  Itis noteworthy and remarkable

  to see how man, besides his

  life in the concrete, always

  lives a second life in the

  abstract...(where) in the sphere

  of

  calm

  deliberation,

  what

  previously

  possessed

  him

  completely

  and

  moved

  him

  intensely appears to him cold,

  colorless, and distant: he is

  a mere spectator and observer.

  _________________________

  As the Bombay-Igatpuri train slowed for a stop at a small village, Pam heard the clangs of ceremonial cymbals and peered through the grimy train window. A dark-eyed boy of about ten or eleven, pointing to her window, ran alongside holding aloft a raised rag and yellow plastic water pail. Since she had arrived in India two weeks ago, Pam had been shaking her head no. No to sightseeing guides, shoe shines, freshly squeezed tangerine juice, sari cloth, Nike tennis shoes, money exchange. No to beggars and no to numerous sexual invitations, sometimes offered frankly, sometimes discreetly by winking, raising eyebrows, licking lips, and flicking tongues. And, finally, she thought, someone has actually offered me something I need. She vigorously nodded yes, yes to the young window washer, who responded with a huge toothy grin. Delighted with Pam's patronage and audience, he washed the pane with long theatrical flourishes.

  Paying him generously and shooing him away as he lingered to stare at her, Pam settled back and watched a procession of villagers snake their way down a dusty street following a priest clad in billowing scarlet trousers and yellow shawl. Their destination was the center of the town square and a large papier-mache statue of Lord Ganesha, a short plump Buddha-like body bearing an elephant's head. Everyone--the priest, the men dressed in gleaming white, and the women robed in saffron and magenta--carried small Ganesha statues. Young girls scattered handfuls of flowers, and pairs of adolescent boys carried poles holding metal burners emitting clouds of incense. Amid the clash of cymbals and the roll of drums, everyone chanted, "Ganapathi bappa Moraya, Purchya varshi laukariya."

  "Pardon me, can you tell me what they're chanting?" Pam turned to the copper-skinned man sitting opposite her sipping tea, the only other passenger sharing the compartment. He was a delicate win-some man dressed in a loose white cotton shirt and trousers. At the sound of Pam's voice he swallowed the wrong way and coughed furiously. Her question delighted him since he had been attempting, in vain, since the train commenced in Bombay to strike up a conversation with the handsome woman sitting across from him. After a vigorous cough he replied, with a squeak, "My apologies, madam. Physiology is not always at one's command. What the people here, and throughout all of India today, are saying is 'Beloved Ganapati, lord of Moraya, come again early next year.'"

  "Ganapati?"

  "Yes, very confusing, I know. Perhaps you know him by his more common name, Ganesha. He has many other names, as well, for example, Vighnesvara, Vinayaka, Gajanana."

  "And this parade?"

  "The beginning of the ten-day festival of Ganesha. Perhaps you may be fortunate enough to be in Bombay next week at the end of the festival and witness the entire population of the city walk into the ocean and immerse their Ganesha statues in incoming waves."

  "Oh, and that? A moon? Or sun?" Pam pointed to four children carrying a large yellow papier-mache globe.

  Vijay purred to himself. He welcomed the questions and hoped the train stop would be long and that this conversation would go on and on. Such voluptuous women were common in American movies, but never before had he had the good fortune to speak to one. This woman's grace and pale beauty stirred his imagination. She seemed to have stepped out of the ancient erotic carvings of the Kama Sutra. And where might this encounter lead? he wondered. Could this be the life-changing event for which he had long sought? He was free, his garment factory had, by Indian standards, made him wealthy. His teenaged fiancee died of tuberculosis two years ago, and, until his parents selected a new bride, he was unencumbered.

  "Ah, it is a moon the children hold. They carry it to honor an old legend. First, you must know that Lord Ganesha was renowned for his appetite. Note his ample belly. He was once invited for a feast and stuffed himself with desert pastries called laddoos. Have you eaten laddoos?"

  Pam shook her head, fearing that he might produce one from his valise. A close friend had contracted hepatitis from a tea shop in India, and thus far she had heeded her physician's advice to eat nothing but four-star-hotel food. When away from the hotel she had limited herself to food she could peel--mainly tangerines, hard-boiled eggs, and peanuts.

  "My mother made wonderful coconut almond laddoos," Vijay continued.

  "Essentially, they are fried flour balls with a sweet cardamom syrup--that sounds prosaic, but you must believe me when I say they are far more than the sum of their ingredients. But back to Lord Ganesha, who was so stuffed that he could not stand up properly. He lost his balance, fell, his stomach burst, and all the laddoos tumbled out.

  "This all took place at night with only one witness, the moon, who found the event hilarious. Enraged, Ganesha cursed the moon and banished him from the universe.

  However, the whole world lamented the moon's absence,
and an assembly of gods asked Lord Shiva, Ganesha's father, to persuade him to relent. The penitent moon also apologized for his misbehavior. Finally, Ganesha modified his curse and announced that the moon need be invisible only one day a month, partially visible the remainder of the month, and for one day only would be permitted to be visible in its full glory."

  A brief silence and Vijay added, "And now you know why the moon plays a role in Lord Ganesha festivals."

  "Thank you for that explanation."

  "My name is Vijay, Vijay Pande."

  "And mine is Pam, Pam Swanvil. What a delightful story, and what a fantastical droll god--that elephant head and Buddha body. And yet the villagers seem to take their myths so seriously...as though they were really--"

  "It's interesting to consider the iconography of Lord Ganesha," Vijay gently interrupted as he pulled from his shirt a large neck pendant on which was carved the image of Ganesha. "Please note that every feature on Ganesha has a serious meaning, a life instruction. Consider the large elephant head: it tells us to think big. And the large ears? To listen more. The small eyes remind us to focus and to concentrate and the small mouth to talk less. And I do not forget Ganesha's instruction--even at this moment as I talk to you I remember his counsel and I warn myself not to talk too much. You must help by telling me when I tell you more than you wish to know."

  "No, not at all. I'm most interested in your comments on iconography."

  "There are many others; here, look closer--we Indians are very serious people."

  He reached into the leather bag he wore on his shoulder and held out a small magnifying lens.

  Taking the glass, Pam leaned over to peer at Vijay's pendant. She inhaled his aroma of cinnamon and cardamon and freshly ironed cotton cloth. How was it possible for him to smell so sweet and so fresh in the close dusty train compartment? "He has only one tusk," she observed.