The Schopenhauer Cure(18)
Julius closed his eyes and lapsed into thought.
Philip waited two or three minutes and then: “What say you to my offer? Even though I’m certain no students will appear, I’m scheduled for office hours after my lecture and so must head back to the administration building.”
“Well Philip, it’s not your everyday offer. I need more time to think it through. Let’s meet later this week. I take off Wednesday afternoons. Can you do four o’clock?”
Philip nodded. “I finish at three on Wednesday. Shall we meet in my office?”
“No, Philip. My office. It’s in my home at two-forty-nine Pacific Avenue, not too far from my old office. Here, take my card.”
Excerpts from Julius’s Journal
After his lecture Philip’s proposal for a supervision-tutoring swap stunned me. How quickly one moves back into the familiar force field of another person! So much like the state-dependent memories in dreams in which the landscape’s eerie familiarity reminds you that you’ve visited the identical locale before in other dreams. Same with marijuana—a couple of hits and suddenly you’re in a familiar place thinking familiar thoughts that exist only in the marijuana state.
And it’s the same with Philip. Only a little time in his presence and—presto—my deep memories of him plus a peculiar Philip-induced state of mind reappear in a flash. How arrogant, how disdainful he is. How uncaring about others. And yet there is something, something strong—I wonder what?—that draws me to him. His intelligence? His loftiness and otherworldliness coupled to such extraordinary na?veté? And how unchanged he is after twenty-two years. No, that’s not true! He’s liberated from the sexual compulsion, no longer doomed to walk nose-to-ground forever sniffing for pussy. He lives much more in the higher places he’s always longed for. But his manipulativeness—that’s still there, and so patent, and he’s so clueless about its visibility, about how I should leap at his offer, how I should give him two hundred hours of my time in return for his teaching me Schopenhauer, and brazenly presenting it as though it was I who suggested it, who want and need it. Can’t deny that I have some slight interest in Schopenhauer, but spending a couple hundred hours with Philip to learn about Schopenhauer right now is low on my wish list. And if that excerpt he read about the dying Buddenbrooks is a prime example of what Schopenhauer has to offer me, then it leaves me cold. The idea of rejoining the universal oneness without any persistence of me and my memories and unique consciousness is the coldest of comfort. No, it’s no comfort at all.
And what draws Philip to me? That’s another question. That crack the other day about the twenty thousand dollars he wasted on his therapy with me—maybe he is still looking for some return on his investment.
Supervise Philip? Make him a legitimate, kosher therapist? There’s a dilemma. Do I want to sponsor him? Do I want to give him my blessing when I don’t believe that a hater (and he is a hater) can help anyone grow?
8
Halcyon Days of Early Childhood
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Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence…and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
* * *
Johanna wrote in her diary that after Arthur’s birth in February 1788 she, like all young mothers, enjoyed playing with her “new doll.” But new dolls soon become old dolls, and within months Joanna wearied of her toy and languished in boredom and isolation in Danzig. Something new was emerging in Johanna—some vague sense that motherhood was not her true destiny, that some other future awaited her. Her summers at the Schopenhauer country estate were particularly difficult. Though Heinrich, accompanied by a clergyman, joined her for weekends, Johanna spent the rest of her time alone with Arthur and her servants. Because of his fierce jealousy, Heinrich forbade his wife to entertain neighbors or to venture from home for any reason.
When Arthur was five, the family encountered great stress. Prussia annexed Danzig, and, shortly before the advancing Prussian troops arrived under the command of the very general Heinrich had insulted years before, the entire Schopenhauer family fled to Hamburg. There, in a strange city, Johanna gave birth to her second child, Adele, and felt ever more trapped and despairing.
Heinrich, Johanna, Arthur, Adele—Father, mother, son, daughter—the four bound together yet unconnected.
To Heinrich, Arthur was a chrysalis destined to emerge as the future head of the Schopenhauer mercantile house. Heinrich was the traditional Schopenhauer father; he attended to business and put his son out of mind, intending to spring into action and assume fatherly duties when Arthur had finished his childhood.
And the wife, what was Heinrich’s plan for her? She was the Schopenhauer family seedpod and cradle. Dangerously vital, she had to be contained, protected, and restrained.
And Johanna? What did she feel? Trapped! Her husband and provider, Heinrich, was her lethal mistake, her joyless jailer, the grim evacuator of her vitality. And her son, Arthur? Was he not part of the trap, the seal to her coffin? A talented woman, Johanna had a desire for expression and self-realization that was growing at a ferocious pace, and Arthur would prove a woefully inadequate recompense for self-renunciation.