The Schopenhauer Cure(31)
On second thought, perhaps the verse was a grim reminder of how, all his life, he had embraced the wrong myth: namely, that everything about Julius Hertzfeld—his fortune, stature, glory—was spiraling upward, and that life would always get better and better. Of course, now he realized that the reverse was true—that the couplet had it right—that the golden age came first, that his innocent, kittenly beginnings, the playfulness, the hide-and-seek, the capture-the-flag games, and the building of forts out of the empty liquor boxes in his father’s store, while unburdened by guilt, guile, knowledge, or duty, was the very best time of life and that as the days and years passed, the intensity of his flame dimmed, and existence grew inexorably more grim. The very worst was saved for last. He recalled Philip’s words about childhood in the last meeting. No doubt about it: Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had that part right.
Julius nodded his head sadly. It was true he had never truly savored the moment, never grasped the present, never said to himself, “This is it, this time, this day—this is what I want! These are the good old days, right now. Let me remain in this moment, let me take root in this place for all time.” No, he had always believed that the juiciest meat of life was yet to be found and had always coveted the future—the time of being older, smarter, bigger, richer. And then came the upheaval, the time of the great reversal, the sudden and cataclysmic deidealization of the future, and the beginning of the aching yearning for what used to be.
When was that reversal? When did nostalgia replace the golden promise of tomorrow? Not in college, where Julius considered everything as prelude (and obstacle) to that grand prize: admission to medical school. Not in medical school, where, in his first years, he yearned to be out of the classrooms and onto the wards as a clinical clerk, with white jacket and stethoscope hanging out of pocket or slung casually about his neck like a steel-and-rubber shawl. Not in the clerkships of his third and fourth medical school years, when he finally took his place on the wards. There he yearned for more authority—to be important, to make vital clinical decisions, to save lives, to dress in blue scrubs and careen a patient on a gurney down the corridor to the OR to perform emergency trauma surgery. Not even when he became chief resident in psychiatry, peeked behind the curtain of shamanism, and was stunned at the limits and uncertainty of his chosen profession.
Without doubt Julius’s chronic and persistent unwillingness to grasp the present had played havoc with his marriage. Though he had loved Miriam from the moment he laid eyes on her in the tenth grade, he simultaneously resented her as an obstacle blocking him from the multitude of women he felt entitled to enjoy. He had never completely acknowledged that his mate-search was over or that his freedom to follow his lust was in the slightest way curtailed. When his internship began he found that the house staff sleeping quarters were immediately adjacent to the nursing school dorm brimming with nubile young nurses who adored doctors. It was a veritable candy store, and he stuffed himself with a rainbow of flavors.
It was only after Miriam’s death that the reversal must have occurred. In the ten years since the car crash took her from him, he had cherished her more than while she was alive. Julius sometimes heaved with despair when he thought of how his lush contentment with Miriam, the true idyllic soaring moments of life, had come and gone without his fully grasping them. Even now, after a decade, he could not speak her name quickly but had to pause after each syllable. He knew also that no other woman would ever really matter to him. Several women temporarily dispelled his loneliness, but it didn’t take long for him, and for them, to realize they would never replace Miriam. More recently, his loneliness was attenuated by a large circle of male friends, several of whom belonged to his psychiatric support group, and by his two children. For the past few years he had taken all his vacations en famille with his two children and five grandchildren.
But all these thoughts and reminiscences had been only nocturnal trailers and short subjects—the main feature of the night’s mentation had been a rehearsal of the speech he would deliver to the therapy group later that afternoon.
He had already gone public about his cancer to many of his friends and his individual therapy patients, yet, curiously, he was painfully preoccupied with his “coming out” in the group. Julius thought it had something to do with his being in love with his therapy group. For twenty-five years he had looked forward eagerly to every meeting. The group was more than a clump of people; it had a life of its own, an enduring personality. Though none of the original members (except, of course, he himself) was still in the group, it had a stable persisting self, a core culture (in the jargon, a unique set of “norms”—unwritten rules) that seemed immortal. No one member could recite the group norms, but everyone could agree whether a certain piece of behavior was appropriate or inappropriate.
The group demanded more energy than any other event of his week, and Julius had labored mightily to keep it afloat. A venerable mercy ship, it had transported a horde of tormented people into safer, happier harbors. How many? Well, since the average stay was between two and three years, Julius figured at least a hundred passengers. From time to time, memories of departed members wafted through his mind, snippets of an interchange, a fleeting visual image of a face or incident. Sad to think that these wisps of memory were all that remained of rich vibrant times, of events bursting with so much life, meaning, and poignancy.
Many years ago Julius had experimented with videotaping the group and playing back some particularly problematic interchanges at the next meeting. These old tapes were in an archaic format no longer compatible with contemporary video playback equipment. Sometimes he fancied retrieving them from his basement storage room, having them converted, and bringing departed patients back to life again. But he never did; he couldn’t bear exposing himself to proof of the illusory nature of life, how it was warehoused on shiny tape and how quickly the present moment and every moment to come will fade into the nothingness of electromagnetic wavelets.