The Schopenhauer Cure(116)
“All those women, hundreds of them, you told us,” said Tony, “there must have been some love going around. You must have felt it. Some of them must have loved you.”
“That was long ago. If any had love for me, I made sure to avoid them. And even if they felt love, it was not love, for me, the real me—it was love for my act, my technique.”
“What’s the real you?” asked Julius.
Philip’s voice grew deadly serious. “Remember what I did for a job when we first met? I was an exterminator—a clever chemist who invented ways to kill insects, or to render them infertile, by using their own hormones. How’s that for irony? The killer with the hormone gun.”
“So the real you is?” Julius persisted.
Philip looked directly into Julius’s eyes: “A monster. A predator. Alone. An insect killer.” His eyes filled with tears. “Full of blind rage. An untouchable. No one who has known me has loved me. Ever. No one could love me.”
Suddenly, Pam rose and walked toward Philip. She signaled Tony to change seats with her and, sitting down next to Philip, took his hand in hers, and said in a soft voice, “I could have loved you, Philip. You were the most beautiful, the most magnificent man I had ever seen. I called and wrote you for weeks after you refused to see me again. I could have loved you, but you polluted—”
“Shhh.” Julius reached over and touched Pam on the shoulder to silence her. “No, Pam, don’t go there. Stay with the first part, say it again.”
“I could have loved you.”
“And you were the…” prompted Julius.
“And you were the most beautiful man I had ever seen.”
“Again,” whispered Julius.
Still holding Philip’s hand and seeing his tears flow freely, Pam repeated, “I could have loved you, Philip. You were the most beautiful man…”
At this Philip, with his hands to his face, rose and bolted from the room.
Tony immediately headed to the door. “That’s my cue.”
Julius, grunting as he too rose, stopped Tony. “No, Tony, this one’s on me.” He strode out and saw Philip at the end of the hall facing the wall, head resting on his forearm, sobbing. He put his arm around Philip’s shoulder and said, “It’s good to let it all out, but we must go back.”
Philip, sobbing more loudly and heaving as he tried to catch his breath, shook his head vigorously.
“You must go back, my boy. This is what you came for, this very moment, and you mustn’t squander it. You’ve worked well today—exactly the way you have to work to become a therapist. Only a couple of minutes left in the meeting. Just come back with me and sit in the room with the others. I’ll watch out for you.”
Philip reached around and briefly, just for a moment, put his hand atop Julius’s hand, then raised himself erect and walked alongside Julius back to the group. As Philip sat down, Pam touched his arm to comfort him, and Gill, sitting on the other side, clasped his shoulder.
“How are you doing, Julius?” asked Bonnie. “You look tired.”
“I’m feeling wonderful in my head, I’m so swept away, so admiring of the work this group has done—I’m so glad to have been a part of this. Physically, yes, I have to admit I am ailing, and weary. But I have more than enough juice left for our last meeting next week.”
“Julius,” said Bonnie, “okay to bring a ceremonial cake for our last meeting?”
“Absolutely, bring any kind of carrot cake you wish.”
But there was to be no formal farewell meeting. The following day Julius was stricken by searing headaches. Within a few hours he passed into a coma and died three days later. At their usual Monday-afternoon time the group gathered at the coffee shop and shared the ceremonial carrot cake in silent grief.
41
Death Comes to Arthur Schopenhauer
* * *
I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body but the idea of philosophy professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder.
* * *
Schopenhauer faced death as he faced everything throughout his life—with extreme lucidity. Never flinching when staring directly at death, never succumbing to the emollient of supernatural belief, he remained committed to reason to the very end of his life. It is through reason, he said, that we first discover our death: we observe the death of others and, by analogy, realize that death must come to us. And it is through reason that we reach the self-evident conclusion that death is the cessation of consciousness and the irreversible annihilation of the self.
There are two ways to confront death, he said: the way of reason or the way of illusion and religion with its hope of persistence of consciousness and cozy afterlife. Hence, the fact and the fear of death is the progenitor of deep thought and the mother of both philosophy and religion.
Throughout his life Schopenhauer struggled with the omnipresence of death. In his first book, written in his twenties, he says: “The life of our bodies is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever deferred death…. Every breath we draw wards off the death that constantly impinges on us, in this way we struggle with it every second.”
How did he depict death? Metaphors of death-confrontation abound in his work; we are sheep cavorting in the pasture, and death is a butcher who capriciously selects one of us and then another for slaughter. Or we are like young children in a theater eager for the show to begin and, fortunately, do not know what is going to happen to us. Or we are sailors, energetically navigating our ships to avoid rocks and whirlpools, all the while heading unerringly to the great final catastrophic shipwreck.