The Schopenhauer Cure(30)

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




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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.



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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 6 A.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.