The Schopenhauer Cure

by Irvin D. Yalom

  "Meaning: retain the good, throw away the bad."

  "And what's that he holds? An ax?"

  "To cut off all bonds of attachment."

  "That sounds like Buddhist doctrine."

  "Yes, remember that the Buddha emerged from the mother ocean of Shiva."

  "And Ganesha holds something in the other hand. It's hard to see. A thread?"

  "A rope to pull one ever closer to your highest goal."

  The train suddenly lurched and began to move forward.

  "Our vehicle is alive again," said Vijay. "Note Ganesha's vehicle--there under his foot."

  Pam moved closer to look through the lens and inhale Vijay's scent discreetly.

  "Oh, yes, the mouse. I've seen it in every statue and painting of Ganesha. I've never known why a mouse."

  "That's the most interesting attribute of all. The mouse is desire. You may ride it but only if you keep it under control. Otherwise it causes havoc."

  Pam fell silent. As the train chugged on past scrawny trees, occasional temples, water buffalo in muddy ponds, and farms whose red soil had been exhausted by thousands of years of work, she looked at Vijay and felt a wave of gratitude. How unobtrusively, how gently, he had taken out his pendant and saved her from the embarrassment of speaking irreverently about his religion. When had she ever been so graced by a man? But no, she reminded herself, don't shortchange other dear men. She thought about her group. There was Tony, who would do anything for her. And Stuart, too, could be generous. And Julius, whose love seemed unending. But Vijay's subtlety--

  that was uncommon, that was exotic.

  And Vijay? He too fell into a reverie, reviewing his conversation with Pam.

  Uncommonly excited, his heart raced, and he sought to calm himself. Opening his leather shoulder pouch, he took out an old wrinkled cigarette package, not to smoke--the package was empty, and besides he had heard of how peculiar Americans were about smoking. He merely wished to study the blue-and-white package, which bore the silhouette of a man wearing a top hat and, in firm black letters, the brand name, The Passing Show.

  One of his first religious teachers had called his attention to the Passing Show, a brand of cigarettes his father smoked, and instructed him to begin his meditation by thinking of all of life as a passing show, a river carrying all objects, all experience, all desires, past his unswerving attention. Vijay meditated on the image of a flowing river and listened to his mind's soundless words, anitya, anitya --impermanence. Everything is impermanent, he reminded himself; all of life and all experience glide by as surely and irrevocably as the passing landscape seen through the train window. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and rested his head upon his seat; his pulse slowed as he entered the welcome harbor of equanimity.

  Pam, who had been eyeing Vijay discreetly, picked up the wrapping that had fallen to the floor, read the label, and said, "The Passing Show--that's an unusual name for cigarettes."

  Vijay slowly opened his eyes and said, "As I said, we Indians are very serious.

  Even our cigarette packages have messages for the conduct of life. Life is a passing show--I meditate on that whenever I feel inner turbulence."

  "Is that what you were just doing a minute ago? I should not have disturbed you."

  Vijay smiled and gently shook his head. "My teacher once said that one can not be disturbed by another. It is only oneself who can disturb one's equanimity." Vijay hesitated, realizing even as it happened that he was awash in desire: he so craved the attention of his traveling companion that he had turned his meditation practice into a mere curiosity--all for the sake of a smile from this lovely woman who was simply an apparition, part of the passing show, soon to pass out of his life and to dissolve into the nonbeing of the past. And knowing, too, that his next words would only take him farther from his path, Vijay nonetheless rashly plunged ahead.

  "There is something I would like to say: I shall long treasure our meeting and our conversation. Shortly I shall depart from this train to an ashram where I must face silence for the next ten days, and I am immeasurably grateful for the words we have exchanged, the moments we have shared. I am reminded of American prison films where the condemned man is permitted to order anything he wishes for his last meal. May I say that I have had my wishes for a last conversation fully granted."

  Pam simply nodded. Rarely at a loss for words, she did not know how to respond directly to Vijay's courtliness. "Ten days at an ashram? Do you mean Igatpuri? I'm on my way there to a retreat."

  "Then we have the same destination and the same goal--to be taught Vipassana meditation by the honored guru Goenka. And very soon, too--it is the next stop."

  "Did you say 'ten days of silence'?"

  "Yes, Goenka always requires noble silence--aside from necessary discussions with the staff, the students are to utter no words. Are you experienced in meditation?"

  Pam shook her head no. "I'm a university professor. I teach English literature, and last year one of my students had a healing and transformative experience at Igatpuri. This student has become very active in organizing Vipassana retreats in the United States and is currently helping to plan an American tour by Goenka."

  "Your student hoped to offer her teacher a gift. She wished that you, too, would undergo a transformation?"

  "Well, something like that. It wasn't that she felt I needed to change some particular thing about myself; it was more that she had profited so much that she wanted me, and others, to have the same experience."

  "Of course. My question was ill put; in no way did I mean to suggest that you need transformation. I was interested in your student's enthusiasm. But did she prepare you for this retreat in any way?"

  "She pointedly did not. She herself stumbled upon this retreat quite by accident and said that it would be best if I too entered it with an entirely open mind. You're shaking your head. You disagree."

  "Ah, remember that Indians shake their heads from side to side when they agree and up and down when they disagree--the reverse of the American custom."

  "Oh my God. I think I've sensed this unconsciously because so much of my interaction with people here has been slightly askew. I must have confused people I spoke with."

  "No, no, Indians who come into contact with Westerners make that adaptation. As for your student's advice to you, I am not certain I agree that you should be entirely unprepared. Let me point out that this is not a beginner's retreat. Noble silence, meditation beginning at fourA.M. , little sleep, one meal a day. A difficult regimen. You must be strong. Ah, the train slows. We are at Igatpuri."

  Vijay stood, collected his belongings, and lifted Pam's valise down from the overhead rack. The train stopped. Vijay prepared to leave and said, "The experience begins."

  Vijay's words offered little comfort, and Pam was growing more apprehensive.

  "Does that mean we will not be able to speak to one another during the retreat?"

  "No communication, not written, not sign language."

  "E-mail?"

  Vijay did not smile. "Noble silence is the correct path to benefit from Vipassana."

  He seemed different. Pam felt him already drifting away.

  "At least," she said, "it will offer me comfort to know you are there. It's less foreboding to imagine being alone together."

  "Alone together. A felicitous phrase," Vijay responded without looking at her.

  "Perhaps," Pam said, "we may meet again on this train after the retreat."

  "Of that we must not think. Goenka will teach us that it is only the present we must inhabit. Yesterday and tomorrow do not exist. Past remembrances, future longings, only produce disquiet. The path to equanimity lies in observing the present and allowing it to float undisturbed down the river of our awareness." Without looking back, Vijay hoisted his bag onto his shoulder, opened the doors of the compartment, and walked away.

  16

  Schopenhauer'

  s Main Woman

  _________________________

  Onlythe<
br />
  male

  intellect,

  clouded by the sexual impulse,

  could

  call

  the

  undersized,

  narrow-shouldered,

  broad—

  hipped, and short-legged sex

  the fair sex.

  --Arthur Schopenhauer on women

  Youreternal

  quibbles,

  your

  laments over the stupid world

  and human misery, give me bad

  nights and unpleasant dreams....

  I

  have

  not

  had

  a

  single

  unpleasant moment I did not

  owe to you.

  --A letter to Arthur Schopenhauer

  from his mother

  _________________________

  The most important woman, by far, in Arthur's life was his mother, Johanna, with whom he had a tormented and ambivalent relationship which ended in cataclysm. Johanna's letter liberating Arthur from his apprenticeship contained admirable motherly sentiments: her concern, her love, her hopes for him. Yet all these required a proviso: namely, that he remain at a convenient distance from her. Hence her letter of liberation advised him to move from Hamburg to Gotha rather than to her home in Weimar, fifty kilometers away.

  The glow of warm feelings between the two following Arthur's emancipation from servitude evaporated quickly because of the brevity of Arthur's stay at the preparatory school in Gotha. After only six months the nineteen-year-old Arthur was expelled for writing a clever but cruelly mocking poem about one of the teachers and beseeched his mother for permission to live with her and continue his studies at Weimar.

  Johanna was not amused; in fact the prospect of Arthur living with her sent her into a frenzy. He had visited her briefly a few times during his six-month stay at Gotha, and each visit had been the source of much displeasure for her. Her letters to him following his expulsion are among the most shocking letters ever written by a mother to a son.

  ...I am acquainted with your disposition...you are irritating and unbearable and I consider it most difficult to live with you. All your good qualities are darkened by your super-cleverness and thus rendered useless to the world...you find fault everywhere except in yourself...thereby you embitter the people around you--no one wishes to be improved or illuminated in such a forcible manner, least of all by such an insignificant individual as you still are. No one can tolerate being criticized by someone who displays so many personal weaknesses, especially your derogatory manner which, in oracular tones, proclaims that this is so and so, without even suspecting the possibility of error.

  If you were less like you are, you would only be ridiculous but, being as you are, you become most annoying.... You might have, like thousands of other students, lived and studied in Gotha...but you did not want this and so you are expelled....

  such a living literary journal as you would like to be is a boring hateful thing because one cannot skip pages or fling the whole rubbishy thing behind the stove, as one can with the printed one.

  In time Johanna resigned herself to the fact that she could not avoid accepting Arthur at Weimar while he prepared for the university, but she wrote again, in case he missed the point, and expressed her concerns in even more graphic terms.

  I think it wisest to tell you straight out what I desire and what I feel about matters so we understand one another from the outset. That I am very fond of you, I'm sure you will not doubt. I have proven it to you and will prove it to you as long as I live. It is necessary for my happiness to know you are happy but not to be a witness to it. I have always told you that you are very difficult to live with.... The more I get to know you the more strongly I feel this.

  I will not hide this from you: as long as you are what you are, I would rather make any sacrifice than consent to be near you.... What repels me does not lie in your heart; it is in your outer, not your inner, being. It is in your ideas, in your judgment, your habits; in a word, there is nothing concerning the outer world in which we agree.

  Look, dear Arthur, each time you visited me only for a few days there were violent scenes about nothing and each time I only breathed freely again when you were gone because your presence, your complaints about inevitable things, your scowling face, your ill humor, the bizarre opinions you utter...all this depresses and troubles me, without helping you.

  Johanna's dynamics seem transparent. By the grace of God she had escaped the marriage that she had feared would imprison her forever. Giddy with freedom, she exalted in the idea of never again being answerable to anyone. She would live her own life, meet whomever she wished, enjoy romantic liaisons (but never marry again), and she would explore her own considerable talents.

  The prospect of relinquishing her freedom for Arthur's sake was unbearable. Not only was Arthur a particularly difficult, controlling person in his own right, but he was the son of her former jailer: the living incarnation of too many of Heinrich's unpleasant features.

  And there was the issue of money. It first surfaced when Arthur, at nineteen, accused his mother of lavish spending, which imperiled the inheritance he was to receive at the age of twenty-one. Johanna bristled, insisted it was well known that she served only bread-and-butter sandwiches at her salons and then excoriated Arthur for living far beyond his means with expensive dining and horseback-riding lessons. Eventually, such quarrels about money were to escalate to unbearable levels.

  Johanna's feelings about Arthur and about motherhood are reflected in her novels: a typical Johanna Schopenhauer heroine tragically loses her true love and then resigns herself to an economically sensible, loveless, and sometimes abusive marriage but, in an act of defiance and self-affirmation, refuses to bear children.

  Arthur shared his feelings with no one, and his mother later destroyed all his letters. Still, certain trends seem self-evident. The bond between Arthur and his mother was intense, and the pain of its dissolution haunted Arthur his entire life. Johanna was an unusual mother--vivacious, forthright, beautiful, freethinking, enlightened, well read.

  Surely, she and Arthur discussed his immersion in modern and ancient literature. Indeed it may be that the fifteen-year-old Arthur made his momentous choice in favor of the grand tour rather than university preparation because of his desire to remain in her presence.

  It was only after his father's death that the tone of the mother-son relationship changed. Arthur's hopes of replacing his father in his mother's heart must have been crushed by her hasty decision to leave him in Hamburg and move to Weimar. If his hopes were revived when his mother liberated him from his pledge to his dead father, they were again shattered when she sent him to Gotha, despite the vastly superior educational resources available in Weimar. Perhaps, as his mother suggested, Arthur intentionally arranged to be expelled from Gotha. If his actions were based on his wishes to rejoin his mother, he must have been disheartened by her unwillingness to welcome him in her new home and by the presence of other men in her life.

  Arthur's guilt about his father's suicide had its origins both in his joy of liberation and in his fear that he may have hastened his father's death by his disinterest in the world of commerce. It was not long before his guilt transformed into a fierce defense of his father's good name, and to vicious criticism of his mother's behavior toward his father.

  Years later he wrote:

  I know women. They regard marriage only as an institution for supply. As my father grew wretchedly sick, he would have been abandoned except for the loving charity of a faithful servant who performed the necessary basic acts of caring. My mother held parties, while he lay down in loneliness; my mother had fun, while he was suffering painfully. That's the love of women!

  When Arthur arrived in Weimar to study with a tutor for university entrance, he was not permitted to live with his mother but in separate lodgings she had found for him.

  Awaiting him there was her lett
er laying out, with ruthless clarity, the rules and boundaries of their relationship.

  Mark now on what footing I wish to be together with you: you are at home in your lodgings, in mine you are a guest...who does not interfere in any domestic arrangements. Every day you will come at one o'clock and stay until three, then I shall not see you again all day long, except on my salon days which you may attend if you wish, also eating at my house those two evenings, provided you will abstain from tiresome arguing, which makes me angry.... During the midday hours you can tell me everything I need to know about you, the rest of the time you must look after yourself. I cannot provide your entertainment at the expense of mine. Enough, now you know my wishes and I hope you will not repay me for my motherly care and love by giving me opposition.

  Arthur accepted these terms during his two-year stay in Weimar and remained strictly an observer at his mother's social evenings, not once engaging the lofty Goethe in conversation. His mastery of Greek, Latin, the classics, and philosophy progressed at a prodigious rate, and, at the age of twenty-one, he was accepted into the University at Gottingen. At the same time he received his inheritance of twenty thousand Reichstalers, enough to provide a sufficient but modest income for the remainder of his life. As his father had predicted, he would have great need of this inheritance--Arthur was never to earn a pfennig from his vocation as a scholar.

  As time passed, Arthur viewed his father as an angel and his mother a devil. He believed that his father's jealousy and suspicions about his mother's fidelity were well founded, and he worried that she would fail to revere his father's memory. In his father's name, he demanded that she live a quiet sequestered life. Arthur vehemently attacked those whom he considered his mother's suitors, judging them lesser, "mass-produced creatures," unworthy of replacing his father.

  Arthur studied at the Universities of Gottingen and Berlin and then obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Jena. He lived briefly in Berlin but soon fled because of the impending war against Napoleon and returned to Weimar to live with his mother. Soon, the same domestic battles erupted: not only did he upbraid his mother for misusing the money he had made available for his grand-mother's care, but he accused her of an improper liaison with her close friend Muller Gerstenbergk. Arthur became so brutally hostile to Gerstenbergk that Johanna was forced to see her friend only when Arthur was absent from the home.