The Schopenhauer Cure(23)
“I’d still like to set the fee.”
“You continue to amaze me, Philip. The goddamnedest things you worry about! And the things you don’t!”
“Just the same, what’s a fair fee?”
“My policy is to charge the supervisee the same fee I charge for individual therapy—with some reduction for beginning students.”
“Done,” said Philip, nodding.
“Hold on, Philip, I want to be certain you’ve heard me say that the idea of a Schopenhauer tutorial arrangement is not of great import to me. When the topic first arose between us, all I did was to voice some slight interest in how Schopenhauer had provided so much help to you, and you ran with the ball and assumed we had made a contractual arrangement.”
“I hope to increase your interest in his work. He had much to say of great value to our field. In so many ways he anticipated Freud, who borrowed his work wholesale, without acknowledgement.”
“I’ll keep an open mind, but, I repeat, many of the things you’ve said about Schopenhauer do not pique my desire to know more about his work.”
“Including what I said in my lecture about his views on death?”
“Especially that. The idea that one’s essential being will ultimately be reunited with some vague, ethereal universal life force offers me zero comfort. If there is no persistence of consciousness, what possible solace could I draw from that? By the same token, I get little comfort from knowing that my bodily molecules will be dispersed into space and that ultimately my DNA will end up being a part of some other life-form.”
“I’d like us to read together his essays on death and on the indestructibility of being. If we did, I’m certain—”
“Not now, Philip. At the moment I’m not as much interested in death as I am in living the rest of my life as fully as possible—that’s where I am.”
“Death is always there, the horizon of all these concerns. Socrates said it most clearly, ‘to learn to live well, one must first learn to die well.’ Or Seneca, ‘No man enjoys the true taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it.’”
“Yes, yes, I know these homilies, and maybe in the abstract they are true. And I have no quarrel with incorporating the wisdom of philosophy into psychotherapy. I’m all for it. And I also know that Schopenhauer has served you well in many ways. But not in all ways: there’s a possibility that you may need some remedial work. And that’s where the group comes in. I look forward to seeing you here for your first meeting next Monday at four-thirty.”
10
The Happiest Years of Arthur’s life
* * *
Just because the terrible activity of the genital system still slumbers, while that of the brain already has its full briskness, childhood is the time of innocence and happiness, the paradise of life, the lost Eden, on which we look back longingly through the whole remaining course of our life.
* * *
When Arthur turned nine, his father decided the time had come to take over the direction of his son’s education. His first step was to deposit him for two years in Le Havre at the home of a business partner, Gregories de Blesimaire. There, Arthur was to learn French, social graces, and, as Heinrich put it, “become read in the books of the world.”
Expelled from home, separated from his parents at the age of nine? How many children have regarded such exile as a catastrophic life event? Yet, later in life, Arthur described these two years as “by far the happiest part of his childhood.”
Something important happened in Le Havre: perhaps for the only time in his life Arthur felt nurtured and enjoyed life. For many years afterward he cherished the memory of the convivial Blesimaires, with whom he found something resembling parental love. His letters to his parents were so full of praise for them that his mother felt compelled to remind him of his father’s virtues and largesse. “Remember how your father permits you to buy that ivory flute for one louis-d’or.”
Another important event took place during his sojourn in Le Havre. Arthur found a friend—one of the very few of his entire life. Anthime, the Blesimaire son, was the same age as Arthur. The two boys became close in Le Havre and exchanged a few letters after Arthur returned to Hamburg.
Years later as young men of twenty they met once again and on a few occasions went out together searching for amorous adventures. Then their paths and their interests diverged. Anthime became a businessman and disappeared from Arthur’s life until thirty years later when they had a brief correspondence in which Arthur sought some financial advice. When Anthime responded with an offer to manage his portfolio for a fee, Arthur abruptly ended the correspondence. By that time he suspected everyone and trusted no one. He put Anthime’s letter aside after jotting on the back of the envelope a cynical aphorism from Gracian (a Spanish philosopher much admired by his father): “Make one’s entry into another’s affair in order to leave with one’s own.”
Arthur and Anthime had one final meeting ten years later—an awkward encounter during which they found little to say to one another. Arthur described his old friend as “an unbearable old man” and wrote in his journal that the “feeling of two friends meeting after a generation of absence will be one of great disappointment with the whole of life.”