The Schopenhauer Cure(4)

A scene he had witnessed a few months ago on a Hawaiian vacation came to mind. While hiking he had quite by chance come upon a large Buddhist retreat center and saw a young woman walking though a circular labyrinth, constructed of small lava stones. Reaching the center of the labyrinth she stopped and remained motionless in a lengthy standing meditation. Julius’s knee-jerk reaction to such religious ritual was not charitable, generally falling somewhere in the territory between ridicule and revulsion.

But, now, as he thought about that meditating young woman, he experienced softer feelings—a flood of compassion for her and for all his fellow humans who are victims of that freakish twist of evolution that grants self-awareness but not the requisite psychological equipment to deal with the pain of transient existence. And so throughout the years, the centuries, the millennia, we have relentlessly constructed makeshift denials of finiteness. Would we, would any of us, ever be done with our search for a higher power with whom we can merge and exist forever, for God-given instruction manuals, for some sign of a larger established design, for ritual and ceremony?

And yet, considering his name on death’s roster, Julius wondered whether a little ceremony might not be such a bad thing. He jerked away from his own thought as if scorched—so thoroughly dissonant was it with his lifelong antagonism to ritual. He had always despised the tools by which religions strip their followers of reason and freedom: the ceremonial robes, incense, holy books, mesmerizing Gregorian chants, prayer wheels, prayer rugs, shawls and skullcaps, bishop’s miters and crosiers, holy wafers and wines, last rites, heads bobbing and bodies swaying to ancient chants—all of which he considered the paraphernalia of the most powerful and longest-running con game in history, a game which empowered the leaders and satisfied the congregation’s lust for submission.

But now, with death standing next to him, Julius noted that his vehemence had lost its bite. Maybe it was simply imposed ritual he disliked. Perhaps a good word could be found for a little personal creative ceremony. He was touched by the newspaper descriptions of the firemen at ground zero in New York, stopping, standing, and removing hats to honor the dead as each pallet of newly discovered remains was brought to the surface. Nothing wrong with honoring the dead…no, not the dead, but honoring the life of the one who died. Or was it something more than honoring, more than sanctifying? Wasn’t the gesture, the ritual of the firemen, also signifying connectivity? The recognition of their relationship, their unity with each victim?

Julius had a personal taste of connectivity a few days after his fateful meeting with his dermatologist when he attended his support group of fellow psychotherapists. His fellow doctors were stunned when Julius revealed the news of his melanoma. After encouraging him to talk himself out, each group member expressed his shock and sorrow. Julius couldn’t find any more words, nor could anyone else. A couple of times someone started to talk but did not, and then it was as if the group agreed nonverbally that words were not necessary. For the final twenty minutes all sat in silence. Such prolonged silences in groups are almost invariably awkward, but this one felt different, almost comforting. Julius was embarrassed to admit, even to himself, that the silence felt “sacred.” Later it occurred to him that the members not only were expressing grief but were also removing their hats, standing at attention, joining and honoring his life.

And perhaps this was a way of honoring their own lives, Julius thought. What else do we have? What else other than this miraculous blessed interval of being and self-awareness? If anything is to be honored and blessed, it should simply be this—the priceless gift of sheer existence. To live in despair because life is finite or because life has no higher purpose or embedded design is crass ingratitude. To dream up an omniscient creator and devote our life to endless genuflection seems pointless. And wasteful, too: why squander all that love on a phantasm when there seems too little love to go around on Earth as it is? Better to embrace Spinoza’s and Einstein’s solution: simply bow one’s head, tip one’s hat to the elegant laws and mystery of nature, and go about the business of living.

These were not new thoughts for Julius—he had always known of finiteness and the evanescence of consciousness. But there is knowing and knowing. And death’s presence on the stage brought him closer to really knowing. It was not that he had grown wiser: it was only that the removal of distractions—ambition, sexual passion, money, prestige, applause, popularity—offered a purer vision. Wasn’t such detachment the Buddha’s truth? Perhaps so, but he preferred the path of the Greeks: everything in moderation. Too much of life’s show is missed if we never take off our coats and join in the fun. Why rush to the exit door before closing time?

After a few days, when Julius felt calmer with fewer sweeps of panic, his thoughts turned to the future. “One good year” Bob King had said, “no guarantees, but it would not be unreasonable to hope for at least a year of good health.” But how to spend that year? One thing he resolved was not to make that one good year a bad year by grieving that it was not more than a year.

One night, unable to sleep and craving some comfort, he restlessly browsed in his library. He could find nothing written in his own field that seemed even remotely relevant to his life situation, nothing pertaining to how should one live, or find meaning in one’s remaining days. But then his eye fell upon a dog-eared copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Julius knew this book well: decades ago he had thoroughly studied it while writing an article on the significant but unacknowledged influence of Nietzsche on Freud. Zarathustra was a brave book which more than any other, Julius thought, teaches how to revere and celebrate life. Yes, this might be the ticket. Too anxious to read systematically, he flipped the pages randomly and sampled some of the lines he had highlighted.