The Schopenhauer Cure(48)
Pam tried to sleep by applying the techniques she had been taught in the workshop to clear her mind and allow all thoughts to drift away. Goenka, a chubby, bronze-skinned, pedantic, exceedingly serious and exceedingly pompous guru, had begun by saying that he would teach Vipassana but first he had to teach the student how to quiet his mind. (Pam endured the exclusive use of the male pronoun; the waves of feminism had yet not lapped upon the shores of India.)
For the first three days Goenka gave instruction in the anapana-sati—mindfulness of breathing. And the days were long. Aside from a daily lecture and a brief question-and-answer period, the only activity from 4 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. was sitting meditation. To achieve full mindfulness of breathing, Goenka exhorted students to study in-breaths and out-breaths.
“Listen. Listen to the sound of your breaths,” he said. “Be conscious of their duration and their temperature. Note the difference between the coolness of in-breaths and the warmth of out-breaths. Become like a sentry watching the gate. Fix your attention upon your nostrils, upon the precise anatomical spot where air enters and leaves.”
“Soon,” Goenka said, “the breath will grow finer and finer until it seems to vanish entirely, but, as you focus ever more deeply, you will be able to discern its subtle and delicate form. If you follow all my instructions faithfully,” he said, pointing to the heavens, “if you are a dedicated student, the practice of anapana-sati will quiet your mind. You will then be liberated from all the hindrances to mindfulness: restlessness, anger, doubt, sensual desire, and drowsiness. You shall awaken into an alert, tranquil, and joyous state.”
Mind-quieting was indeed Pam’s grail—the reason for her pilgrimage to Igatpuri. For the past several weeks her mind had been a battlefield from which she fiercely tried to repel noisy, obsessive, intrusive memories and fantasies about her husband, Earl, and her lover, John. Earl had been her gynecologist seven years ago when she had become pregnant and decided upon an abortion, electing not to inform the father, a casual sexual playmate with whom she wished no deeper involvement. Earl was an uncommonly gentle, caring man. He skillfully performed the abortion and then provided unusual postoperative follow-up by phoning her twice at home to inquire about her condition. Surely, she thought, all the accounts of the demise of humane, dedicated medical care were hyperbolic rhetoric. Then, a few days later, came a third call which conveyed an invitation to lunch, during which Earl skillfully negotiated the segue from doctor to suitor. It was during their fourth call that she agreed, not without enthusiasm, to accompany him to a New Orleans medical convention.
Their courtship proceeded with astonishing quickness. No man ever knew her so well, comforted her so much, was so exquisitely familiar with her every nook and cranny, nor afforded her more sexual pleasure. Though he had many wonderful qualities—he was competent, handsome, and carried himself well—she conferred upon him (she now realized) heroic, larger-than-life stature. Dazzled at being the chosen one, at being promoted to the head of the line of women packing his office clamoring for his healing touch, she fell wholly in love and agreed to marriage a few weeks later.
At first married life was idyllic. But midway into the second year, the reality of being married to a man twenty-five years older set in: he needed more rest; his body showed his sixty-five years; white hair appeared in defiance of Grecian formula hair dye. Earl’s rotator cuff injury ended their tennis Sundays together, and when a torn knee cartilage put an end to his skiing, Earl put his Tahoe house on the market without consulting her. Sheila, her close friend and college roommate, who had advised her not to marry an older man, now urged her to maintain her own identity and not be in a rush to grow old. Pam felt fast-forwarded. Earl’s aging fed on her youth. Each night he came home with barely enough energy to sip his three martinis and watch TV.
And the worst of it was that he never read. How fluently, how confidently he had once conversed about literature. How much his love of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda had endeared him to her. And what a shock to realize only a short time later that she had mistaken form for substance: not only were Earl’s literary observations memorized, but his repertory of books was limited and static. That was the toughest hit: how could she have ever loved a man who did not read? She, whose dearest and closest friends dwelled in the pages of George Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch, Gaskell, and Byatt?
And that was where John, a red-haired associate professor in her department at Berkeley with an armful of books, a long graceful neck, and a stand-up Adam’s apple, came in. Though English professors were expected to be well-read, she had known too many who rarely ventured out of their century of expertise and were complete strangers to new fiction. But John read everything. Three years before she had supported his tenure appointment on the basis of his two dazzling books, Chess: The Aesthetics of Brutality in Contemporary Fiction and No Sir!: The Androgynous Heroine in Late Nineteenth-Century British Literature.
Their friendship germinated in all the familiar romantic academic haunts: faculty and departmental committee meetings, faculty club luncheons, monthly readings in the Norris Auditorium by the poet or novelist in residence. It took root and blossomed in shared academic adventures, such as team teaching the nineteenth-century greats in the Western civilization curriculum or guest lectures in each other’s courses. And then permanent bonding took place in the trench warfare of faculty senate squabbles, space and salary sorties, and brutal promotion committee melees. Before long they so trusted each other’s taste that they rarely looked elsewhere for recommendations for novels and poetry, and the e-mail ether between them crackled with meaty philosophical literary passages. Both eschewed quotations that were merely decorative or clumsily clever; they settled for nothing less than the sublime—beauty plus wisdom for the ages. They both loathed Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both loved Dickinson and Emerson. As their shared stack of books grew taller, their relationship evolved into ever greater harmony. They were moved by the same profound thoughts of the same writers. They reached epiphanies together. In short, these two English professors were in love.