The Schopenhauer Cure(47)
“You make me sound like a whore.” Rebecca swiveled suddenly to Philip. “Doesn’t that make you think I’m a whore?”
Philip, not distracted from gazing at his favorite spot somewhere on the ceiling, answered quickly, “Schopenhauer said that a highly attractive women, like a highly intelligent man, was absolutely destined to living an isolated life. He pointed out that others are blind with envy and resent the superior person. For that reason, such people never have close friends of their same sex.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” said Bonnie. “I’m thinking of Pam, our missing member, who is beautiful too and yet has a large number of close girlfriends.”
“Yeah, Philip,” said Tony, “you saying that, to be popular, you have to be dumb or ugly?”
“Precisely,” said Philip, “and the wise person will not spend his life or her life pursuing popularity. It is a will-o’-the-wisp. Popularity does not define what is true or what is good; quite the contrary, it’s a leveler, a dumbing down. Far better to search within for one’s values and goals.”
“And how about your goals and values?” asked Tony.
If Philip noted the surliness in Tony’s question, he gave no evidence of it and replied ingenuously, “Like Schopenhauer, I want to will as little as possible and to know as much as possible.”
Tony nodded, obviously baffled about how to respond.
Rebecca broke in: “Philip, what you or Schopenhauer was saying about friends was right on the mark for me—the truth is that I’ve had few close girlfriends. But what about two people with similar interests and abilities? Don’t you think that friendship is possible in that case?”
Before Philip could answer, Julius enjoined, “Our time is growing very short today. I want to check in about how you all are feeling about our last fifteen minutes. How are we doing here?”
“We’re not on target. We’re missing,” said Gill. “Something oblique is going on.”
“I’m absorbed,” said Rebecca.
“Nah, too much in our heads,” said Tony.
“I agree,” said Stuart.
“Well, I’m not in my head,” said Bonnie. “I’m close to bursting, or screaming, or…” Bonnie suddenly rose, gathered up her purse and jacket, and charged out of the room. A moment later Gill jumped up and ran out of the room to fetch her back. In awkward silence the group sat listening to the retreating footsteps. Shortly Gill returned, and as he sat he reported, “She’s okay, said she’s sorry but she just had to get out to decompress. She’ll go into it next week.”
“What is going on?” said Rebecca, snapping open her purse to get sunglasses and car keys. “I hate it when she does that. That’s really pissy.”
“Any hunches about what’s going on?” asked Julius.
“PMT, I think,” said Rebecca.
Tony spotted Philip scrunching his face signifying confusion and jumped in. “PMT—premenstrual tension.” When Philip nodded, Tony clenched his hands and poked both thumbs upward, “Hey, hey, I taught you something,”
“We’ve gotta stop,” said Julius, “but I’ve got a guess about what’s going on with Bonnie. Go back to Stuart’s summary. Remember how Bonnie started the meeting—talking about the chubby little girl at school and her unpopularity and her inability to compete with other girls, especially attractive ones? Well, I wonder if that wasn’t recreated in the group today? She opened the meeting, and pretty quickly the group left her for Rebecca. In other words, the very issue she wanted to talk about may have been portrayed here in living color with all of us playing a part in the pageant.”
18
Pam in India (2)
* * *
Nothing can alarm or move him any more. All the thousand threads of willing binding us to the world and dragging us (full of anxiety, craving, anger, and fear) back and forth in constant pain: all these he has cut asunder. He smiles and looks back calmly on the phantasmagoria of this world which now stands before him as indifferently as chess-men at the end of a game.
* * *
It was a few days later at 3 A.M. Pam lay awake, peering into the darkness. Thanks to the intervention of her graduate student, Marjorie, who had arranged VIP privileges, she had a semiprivate room in a tiny alcove with a private toilet just off the women’s common dormitory. However, the alcove provided no sound buffer, and Pam listened to the breathing of 150 other Vipassana students. The whoosh of moving air transported her back to her attic bedroom in her parents’ Baltimore home when she lay awake listening to the March wind rattling the window.
Pam could put up with any of the other ashram hardships—the 4 A.M. wakeup time, the frugal vegetarian one-meal-a-day diet, the endless hours of meditation, the silence, the Spartan quarters—but the sleeplessness was wearing her down. The mechanism of falling asleep completely eluded her. How did she used to do it? No, wrong question, she told herself—a question that compounded the problem because falling asleep is one of those things that cannot be willed; it must be done unintentionally. Suddenly, an old memory of Freddie the pig floated into her mind. Freddie, a master detective in a series of children’s books she hadn’t thought about in twenty-five years, was asked for help by a centipede who could no longer walk because his hundred legs were out of sync. Eventually, Freddie solved the problem by instructing the centipede to walk without looking at his legs—or even thinking about them. The solution lay in turning off awareness and permitting the body’s wisdom to take over. It was the same with sleeping.