Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  When the chairman of a conference attended by Feynman proclaimed that scientists should teach what is known about science and not the “wonders of science,” Feynman passionately disagreed. “I think we should teach them wonders,” he insisted, “that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. And that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework the wonder that nature is.” The thrill and mystery of nature, he said, “come again and again,” and with more knowledge comes “deeper, more wonderful mystery.” (Einstein spoke of this love for the mysterious as well. “The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious,” he said in Berlin, in 1932. “It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead then at least blind.” Einstein, like Feynman, felt that the mystery of nature carried with it a trace of religion: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”)

  Feynman knew—his life was a testament to it—that exploration leads to pleasure and that such pleasure, in turn, leads to more discovery; that wonderful mysteries lure one “to penetrate deeper still … we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries—certainly a grand adventure!” He addressed Thoreau’s pessimism about education—that it “makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook”—with the expansive love and optimism of a wondering mind. (Carl Sagan, another great teacher of science, agreed that to teach science is to teach awe. “Not explaining science seems to me perverse,” he once said. “When you’re in love you want to tell the world.” When we understand science, he continued, “we’re moved—because in its encounter with Nature, science invariably conveys reverence and awe.”)

  Feynman dazzled his audiences with intellectual cape-work and held them riveted by wit and energy. Mostly, he infected audiences with his own joy in discovering the “beautiful things” of nature. Exuberance is beauty, declared Blake, and so Feynman showed it to be. “I’m delighted with the width of the world!” he said, and he found great delight in sharing his joy with others: “I love to teach. I like to think of new ways of looking at things as I explain them, to make them clearer—but maybe I’m not making them clearer. Probably what I’m doing is entertaining myself.”

  The world outside the lecture halls of Caltech needs enthusiastic teachers more than did the math and science students kept enthralled by Richard Feynman. In The Water Is Wide—a devastating, often hilarious, but finally heartbreaking account of a year fighting dim-witted education bureaucrats while trying to teach impoverished African-American schoolchildren living on an island off the South Carolina coast—the novelist Pat Conroy makes this point painfully clear. When Conroy first met with the children assigned to him, he found that they had been taught next to nothing. They were essentially illiterate; their expectations of life were bleak and their notions of themselves worse. The school system had given up on them, if indeed it had ever tried at all. Many of his students could not recite the alphabet, he discovered by the end of his first day of teaching, and several could not spell their own names. The litany of neglect went on: most of the children thought John F. Kennedy was the first president of the United States and they “concurred with the pre-Copernican Theory that the earth was the center of the universe”; two children did not know how old they were.

  Conroy went through an early and understandable period of complete discouragement: “What could I teach them or give them that would substantially alter the course of their lives? Nothing. Not a goddam thing. Each had come into the world imprisoned by the water binding them to their island and by a system which insured his destruction the moment he uttered his first cry by his mother’s side.” Learning not only was not fun, it was at its best drudgery; at worst it came with whippings and humiliation. It seemed impossible to instill joy in such forgotten children. Conroy was saved, in the end, by his own enthusiasm for life and an emerging belief that a “pep-rally” method of education could work. He would transfuse his energies into his students: “All right, young cats,” he told his young students, “we are about to embark on a journey of knowledge.”

  Their journey was led by a wildly enthusiastic young teacher who believed that learning could be fun, that “life was good, but it was hard; we would prepare to meet it head on, but we would enjoy the preparation.” Conroy used everything he could find to cast a spell, to pique curiosity, to encourage exploration: he and his students listened to music, went to the theater, and watched films; they took field trips and talked about witches. They danced; they sang. They were, Conroy exorted them, “going to have more twenty-four-carat fun than any group in the long history of mankind.” His expansiveness pushed them not just onward but upward. He railed against the philosophy of his predecessor, which had been in effect: Keep them busy. We are not here to have fun. We are here to educate. (Henry Adams would have recognized this philosophy. “The chief wonder of education,” he had said, “is that it does not ruin.”)

  What was perhaps of most lasting value, Conroy tried to give his students a sense of the glory of their own island; how to observe and learn from the natural beauties of its plants and sea animals; how to know and to love the beach and gardens. He tried, he writes, to teach them to “embrace life openly, to reflect upon its mysteries, rejoice in its surprises, and to reject its cruelties.” He failed to do much of what he set out to do, of course; perhaps this is inevitable in shooting for the moon. But a teacher need not do all that may at first seem essential: if he is exuberant, some of the joy will stick; if optimistic, some of the hope will linger; if delighting in the adventure of life, a bit of that excitement will obtain.

  To teach unusually well is indeed to create magic. Teaching is a first and noble calling. “Lord, I am a teacher and a coach,” proclaims Pat Conroy’s protagonist at the end of The Prince of Tides: “That is all and it is enough.”

  Parents are our first and most enduring teachers. My father was studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California—Los Angeles when he looked up and noticed a quotation from Michael Faraday carved into an archway over the physics building. He was completely enchanted and insisted on taking me to see it as well. I loved the quotation as much as he did and often sought it out when I was a student and then a professor at UCLA. Years later, however, with a jadedness I didn’t entirely feel, I wrote that life hadn’t always been so wonderful for Faraday—mentioning, among other things, his nervous breakdowns—and that his observation, in any event, was demonstrably untrue. My father read my book, said he felt otherwise, and sent me a note. He would like to share with me, he said, Faraday’s “affirmation.” Enclosed with his note was a gold locket from Tiffany; it was inscribed, “Nothing is too wonderful to be true—Michael Faraday.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “We Should Grow Too Fond of It”

  (photo credit 9.1)

  There are dead ideas and cold beliefs, wrote William James, and then there are hot and live ones. When an idea “grows hot and lives within us,” he believed, everything must recrystallize around it. The exuberant life, bursting as it does with feverish beliefs, is one of constant recrystallization; in this lies much of its value, complexity, and potential danger.

  Passionate enthusiasms, I have argued throughout this book, are as essential to survival as they are indispensable to imagination and social change. Passions bring to our attention the overlooked; they compel commitment of time and heart. They persuade by sheer dominance of the emotional and mental field, for they are, as the Harvard scholar Philip Fisher observes, “monarchical” in their power: they drive out other states of being, even those that are themselves extreme. Man’s exhilaration in war, for example, serves in part to impede its terror; curiosity countervails fatigue and setback; and the th
rill of the chase acts to overwhelm the hunter’s fear of what he hunts.

  That which is most deeply felt is also most powerfully expressed to others. “We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto,” said Thoreau. “The body the senses must conspire with the spirit—Expression is the act of the whole man. that our speech may be vascular.” But our beholdenness to passion assures a darker side. Exuberance can veer sharply into disturbing territory. Champagne enchants, but it also intoxicates more quickly than stiller wines: heed glides into heedlessness as effortlessly as the silk chemise drops to the floor. The things that excite contain the capacity for excess and the potential to shame or devastate. Enthusiasm shares a border with fanaticism, and joy with hysteria; exuberance lives in uncomfortable proximity to mania. Exuberance, as Shakespeare wrote of music, “hath such a charm/To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.” Thwarted or deviant enthusiasms, once provoked, are powers to reckon with.

  The fever of passion itself is not the difficulty, argued William James; rather, trouble lies in the nature of the passion and how well it holds up to the light of day. “Surely the fever process as such is not the ground for our disesteem,” he wrote. “For ought we know to the contrary, 103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees. It is the disagreeableness itself of the fancies, or their inability to bear the criticisms of the convalescent hour.”

  Disagreeable fancies are irksome at best and calamitous at worst. Too ardent or misdirected exuberance creates mayhem for the individual and exposes others to the possibility of mishap, if not actual danger. Unchecked, enthusiasm runs roughshod over reason and intrudes into the private emotional territory of others, imposing, as it goes, its own energy and tempo. Exuberance whips its way in, dominant, and forces itself upon those trapped in its eddy. At its best, it is infectious and enlivening; at its worst, it stifles the ideas and feelings of the less exuberant. Not everyone delights in delight, especially if it is not their own, and few wish to have their moods hijacked by those of others. Sustained or nuanced social interactions are difficult in the presence of great exuberance, and indiscriminate enthusiasm hinders the discernment necessary to sort out true friend from possible foe. The lack of fixity creates discomfort and mistrust: the mobility of mind and attachment that is artistically helpful may not prove an asset in other circumstances. Like Browning’s Last Duchess, who had “A Heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er/She looked on, and her looks went everywhere,” the exuberant are easily engaged. And exuberance is, in its very effusiveness, liable to misconstruction and suspicion, often misinterpreted as sexual interest when none is intended, or as implying a more sustained emotional commitment than is warranted by the high spirits that, however persuasive, may prove to be transient or directed in any number of places.

  Those who are most exuberant are often acutely aware of the toll their enthusiasms can take. The late J. Carter Brown, who was for many years the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was a great enthusiast who attributed much of his passion for art to his exuberant temperament. Brown’s family motto is “Gaudeo” (“I rejoice”), and those who knew him appreciated how true to its bearer that was. After Brown’s death in 2002, Mark Leithauser, the chief of design at the National Gallery, said of him that “there was this restless creativity, this striving.… He loved what he was doing and that was infectious to everybody around him.” One day, Leithauser recalled, as he was walking by the Mall and the Washington Monument, he saw Brown “pull up in his BMW and stop right in traffic, and jump out of the car and run among the cherry blossom trees, just taking them in, enjoying them.” Paul Richard, an art critic for the Washington Post, noted “something buoyant, almost boyish about [him].” Brown, he said, “thought sprightly thoughts.” He was a man of both grace and zest.

  Carter Brown was mindful, however, that not everyone found his energy to their liking (although most who knew him certainly did). His tendency, as he put it, to “lope into others’ pastures” was, he acknowledged, not infrequently experienced as “grating.” Brown, who could no more keep his enthusiasm in check than an otter can keep to the riverbank, believed that his exuberance was an integral part of his leadership of the National Gallery, but he was also aware that it caused envy in some and made others feel overwhelmed. Brown said he tried to slow down his speech and to keep his long arms and hands from waving into the “emotional space” of other people, but that it was an uphill fight. He was a WASP who did not always keep to the constrained ways of the WASP. But then, as the Harvard theologian Peter Gomes has observed, Carter Brown was also a preacher. “His text was beauty,” said Gomes, “and his parish was the nation.”

  Richard Feynman spoke of a similar daunting-by-dint-of-enthusiasm phenomenon in his role as a teacher. Although a brilliant lecturer, he found that the eclipsing power of his enthusiasm made it difficult at times to allow his research students the room to develop their own ideas. “I’ve put a lot of energy into my students,” he said, “but I think I wreck them somehow.” He was constitutionally incapable of standing back from an intriguing scientific problem; on more than one occasion, he took up the dissertation topic or other intellectual problem assigned to a student, wrapped his formidable brain around it, and solved it more quickly or elegantly than the student could. Feynman was a magician, according to the mathematician Marc Kac, and magicians “seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works.” The very enthusiasm and curiosity that made Feynman’s ideas and lectures magical were, for at least some of his graduate students, also intimidating. Feynman was, as Rabbit had said of Tigger, the sort “who was always in front when you were showing him anywhere.”

  Exuberance disturbs in other ways as well. Without a counterweight or discipline, it can be dazzling scattershot: excitement without substance, all fizz and no gin. When enthusiasm lacks a fuller emotional or intellectual context, it lends credibility to those, more circumspect, who contend that high spirits and unrelenting optimism are intrinsically shallow, pas sérieux, lacking the gravitas of the tragic or heroic, wanting in grandeur, not struggling with profound issues of humanity, not contending with the shadows cast by death. Exuberance is not an inward-looking state; it looks upward and forward, rarely to the past. Disquieting emotions are overpowered by the excitement of the idea or the moment; the past cedes its territory to the present and future.

  Leon Wieseltier, in his remarkable book Kaddish, derides what he sees as the American preoccupation with moving on, “closure,” tidying up painful experiences and memories. He is not speaking of exuberance, but his concern, the danger of disregarding the essential lessons of the past, is germane: “Americans really believe that the past is past,” he writes. “They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities.” The forward thrust of exuberance, like closure, risks leaving behind an essential past.

  “Rainbows flowered for my father in every sky,” wrote Wallace Stegner of his exuberant father. “Led by pillars of fire and cloud,” the older Stegner was a “boomer, a gambler, a rainbow-chaser, as footloose as a tumbleweed in a windstorm.” Because his father was so restless, Stegner knew constant motion as a child. It was only as he grew older that he fully realized the drawbacks of unrest and appreciated the importance of his mother’s desire for a sense of place, for settling long enough to know the land and other people. The swirl of movement was exciting, but it was in putting down roots that he came to know himself and to understand the attraction and failures of the American West.

  Western expansion, Stegner believed, was a case study in unfett
ered exuberance, one that had led to reckless exploitation of the land. The dangers from the “come-all-ye enthusiasm” and restless wanderings of men like Stegner’s father were real. Moving away from the past may have been essential, but it was action that carried a cost. “Complete independence, absolute freedom of movement, are exhilarating for a time,” cautions Stegner, “but they may not wear well.” It is, he continues, “probably time we settled down. It is probably time we looked around us instead of looking ahead.… History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history, we did both the country and ourselves some harm along with some good. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but belonging.… Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established.”

  Many who are not exuberant are wary of those who exhibit unbridled enthusiasm, not only because of their insensitivity to personal and social history, but because their interests are strewn so widely as to be diffuse, themeless, and shallow. Exuberants, they believe, are easily excited—magpies who swoop down on glittering things—but lack the discipline or capacity to discriminate the meaningful from the superficial. Christopher Irmscher, in The Poetics of Natural History, makes this point about the ever-exuberant P. T. Barnum. Barnum’s museum, hugely successful with the public, brimmed over with items that had caught Barnum’s enthusiastic eye over the years—more than 100,000 “curiosities”: a snuffbox made out of bits of the pulpit used by John Knox; a dried mermaid; the head of a fossil elk; anacondas; a Chinese summer tea house; a mammoth ox; and a “curious mortuary memorial” to Washington and Lincoln, which was ten feet high and made from more than two million seashells. But, as Irmscher notes, “[t]he principle of Barnum’s museum is the profusion of sights, not the achievement of insight into a predetermined order of things.” Even recurrent themes, he observes, “point less to an order intrinsic to the collection than to a meaning superimposed on it by the avuncular collector.” An exuberant temperament by no means leads inevitably, or even usually, to shallowness, but the potential is there. Subtleties and sustained thought can be lost in a swirl of vivacious moods and energies, just as monomaniacal enthusiasm can limit awareness of and sensitivity to the perspectives, needs, and contributions of other people.