by Irvin Yalom
“Philip,” Julius asked, “how is this all feeling today? Are we laying too much on you at once?”
“I’m tempted to defend myself by pointing out that not one of the great philosophers ever married, except Montaigne, who remained so disinterested in his family that he was unsure how many children he had. But, with only one remaining meeting, what’s the point? It’s hard to listen constructively when my entire course, everything I plan to do as a counselor, is under attack.”
“Speaking for myself, that’s not true. There’s a great deal you can contribute, much that you have contributed to the members here. Right?” Julius scanned the group.
After lots of strenuous head-nodding affirmation for Philip, Julius continued: “But, if you’re to be a counselor, you must enter the social world. I want to remind you that many, I would bet most, of those who will consult you in your practice will need help in their interpersonal relationships, and if you want to support yourself as a therapist, you must become an expert in these matters—there’s no other way. Just take a look around the group: everyone here entered because of conflicted relationships. Pam came in because of problems with the men in her life, Rebecca because of the way her looks influenced her relations with others, Tony because of a mutually destructive relationship with Lizzy and his frequent fights with other men, and so on for everyone.”
Julius hesitated, then decided to include all the members. “Gill entered because of marital conflict. Stuart because his wife was threatening to leave him, Bonnie because of loneliness and problems with her daughter and ex-husband. You see what I mean, relationships cannot be ignored. And, don’t forget, that’s the very reason I insisted you enter the group before offering you supervision.”
“Perhaps there’s no hope for me. My slate of relationships, past and present, is blank. Not with family, not with friends, not with lovers. I treasure my solitude, but the extent of it would, I think, be shocking to you.”
“A couple times after group,” said Tony, “I’ve asked if you wanted to have a bite together. You always refused, and I figured it was because you had other plans.”
“I haven’t had a meal with anyone for twelve years. Maybe an occasional rushed sandwich lunch, but not a real meal. You’re right, Julius, I guess Epicurus would say I live the life of a wolf. A few weeks ago after that meeting when I got so upset, one of the thoughts that circled in my mind was that the mansion of thought I had built for my life was unheated. The group is warm. This room is warm but my living places are arctic cold. And as for love, it’s absolutely alien to me.”
“All those women, hundreds of them, you told us,” said Tony, “there must have been some love going around. You must have felt it. Some of them must have loved you.”
“That was long ago. If any had love for me, I made sure to avoid them. And even if they felt love, it was not love, for me, the real me—it was love for my act, my technique.”
“What’s the real you?” asked Julius.
Philip’s voice grew deadly serious. “Remember what I did for a job when we first met? I was an exterminator—a clever chemist who invented ways to kill insects, or to render them infertile, by using their own hormones. How’s that for irony? The killer with the hormone gun.”
“So the real you is?” Julius persisted.
Philip looked directly into Julius’s eyes: “A monster. A predator. Alone. An insect killer.” His eyes filled with tears. “Full of blind rage. An untouchable. No one who has known me has loved me. Ever. No one could love me.”
Suddenly, Pam rose and walked toward Philip. She signaled Tony to change seats with her and, sitting down next to Philip, took his hand in hers, and said in a soft voice, “I could have loved you, Philip. You were the most beautiful, the most magnificent man I had ever seen. I called and wrote you for weeks after you refused to see me again. I could have loved you, but you polluted—”
“Shhh.” Julius reached over and touched Pam on the shoulder to silence her. “No, Pam, don’t go there. Stay with the first part, say it again.”
“I could have loved you.”
“And you were the…” prompted Julius.
“And you were the most beautiful man I had ever seen.”
“Again,” whispered Julius.
Still holding Philip’s hand and seeing his tears flow freely, Pam repeated, “I could have loved you, Philip. You were the most beautiful man…”
At this Philip, with his hands to his face, rose and bolted from the room.
Tony immediately headed to the door. “That’s my cue.”
Julius, grunting as he too rose, stopped Tony. “No, Tony, this one’s on me.” He strode out and saw Philip at the end of the hall facing the wall, head resting on his forearm, sobbing. He put his arm around Philip’s shoulder and said, “It’s good to let it all out, but we must go back.”
Philip, sobbing more loudly and heaving as he tried to catch his breath, shook his head vigorously.
“You must go back, my boy. This is what you came for, this very moment, and you mustn’t squander it. You’ve worked well today—exactly the way you have to work to become a therapist. Only a couple of minutes left in the meeting. Just come back with me and sit in the room with the others. I’ll watch out for you.”
Philip reached around and briefly, just for a moment, put his hand atop Julius’s hand, then raised himself erect and walked alongside Julius back to the group. As Philip sat down, Pam touched his arm to comfort him, and Gill, sitting on the other side, clasped his shoulder.
“How are you doing, Julius?” asked Bonnie. “You look tired.”
“I’m feeling wonderful in my head, I’m so swept away, so admiring of the work this group has done—I’m so glad to have been a part of this. Physically, yes, I have to admit I am ailing, and weary. But I have more than enough juice left for our last meeting next week.”
“Julius,” said Bonnie, “okay to bring a ceremonial cake for our last meeting?”
“Absolutely, bring any kind of carrot cake you wish.”
But there was to be no formal farewell meeting. The following day Julius was stricken by searing headaches. Within a few hours he passed into a coma and died three days later. At their usual Monday-afternoon time the group gathered at the coffee shop and shared the ceremonial carrot cake in silent grief.
41
Death Comes to Arthur Schopenhauer
* * *
I can bear the thought that in a short time worms will eat away my body but the idea of philosophy professors nibbling at my philosophy makes me shudder.
* * *
Schopenhauer faced death as he faced everything throughout his life—with extreme lucidity. Never flinching when staring directly at death, never succumbing to the emollient of supernatural belief, he remained committed to reason to the very end of his life. It is through reason, he said, that we first discover our death: we observe the death of others and, by analogy, realize that death must come to us. And it is through reason that we reach the self-evident conclusion that death is the cessation of consciousness and the irreversible annihilation of the self.
There are two ways to confront death, he said: the way of reason or the way of illusion and religion with its hope of persistence of consciousness and cozy afterlife. Hence, the fact and the fear of death is the progenitor of deep thought and the mother of both philosophy and religion.
Throughout his life Schopenhauer struggled with the omnipresence of death. In his first book, written in his twenties, he says: “The life of our bodies is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever deferred death…. Every breath we draw wards off the death that constantly impinges on us, in this way we struggle with it every second.”
How did he depict death? Metaphors of death-confrontation abound in his work; we are sheep cavorting in the pasture, and death is a butcher who capriciously selects one of us and then another for slaughter. Or we are like young children in a theater eager for the show to begin and, fortunately, do not know what is going t
o happen to us. Or we are sailors, energetically navigating our ships to avoid rocks and whirlpools, all the while heading unerringly to the great final catastrophic shipwreck.
His descriptions of the life cycle always portray an inexorably despairing voyage.
What a difference there is between our beginning and our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction of all the organs and the musty odor of corpses. The path from birth to death is always downhill as regards well-being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully dreaming childhood, lighthearted youth, toilsome manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it not look exactly like existence were a false step whose consequences gradually become more and more obvious?
Did he fear his own death? In his later years he expressed a great calmness about dying. Whence his tranquillity? If the fear of death is ubiquitous, if it haunts us all our life, if death is so fearsome that vast numbers of religions have emerged to contain it, how did the isolated and secular Schopenhauer quell its terror for himself?
His methods were based on intellectual analysis of the sources of death-anxiety. Do we dread death because it is alien and unfamiliar? If so, he insists we are mistaken because death is far more familiar than we generally think. Not only have we a taste of death daily in our sleep or in states of unconsciousness, but we have all passed through an eternity of nonbeing before we existed.
Do we dread death because it is evil? (Consider the gruesome iconography commonly depicting death.) Here too he insists we are mistaken: “It is absurd to consider nonexistence as an evil: for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence and consciousness…. to have lost what cannot be missed is obviously no evil.” And he asks us to keep in mind that life is suffering, that it is an evil in itself. That being so, how can losing an evil be an evil? Death, he says, should be considered a blessing, a release from the inexorable anguish of biped existence. “We should welcome it as a desirable and happy event instead of, as is usually the case, with fear and trembling.” Life should be reviled for interrupting our blissful nonexistence, and, in this context, he makes his controversial claim: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead if they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” He cites similar utterances by Plato, Socrates, and Voltaire.
In addition to his rational arguments, Schopenhauer proffers one that borders on mysticism. He flirts with (but does not marry) a form of immortality. In his view, our inner nature is indestructible because we are but a manifestation of the life force, the will, the thing-in-itself which persists eternally. Hence, death is not true annihilation; when our insignificant life is over, we shall rejoin the primal life force that lies outside of time.
The idea of rejoining the life force after death apparently offered relief to Schopenhauer and to many of his readers (for example, Thomas Mann and his fictional protagonist Thomas Buddenbrooks), but because it does not include a continued personal self, strikes many as offering only chilly comfort. (Even the comfort experienced by Thomas Buddenbrooks is short-lived and evaporates a few pages later.) A dialogue that Schopenhauer composed between two Hellenic philosophers raises the question of just how much comfort Schopenhauer drew from these beliefs. In this conversation, Philalethes attempts to persuade Thrasymachos (a thoroughgoing skeptic) that death holds no terror because of the individual’s indestructible essence. Each philosopher argues so lucidly and so powerfully that the reader cannot be sure where the author’s sentiments lay. At the end the skeptic, Thrasymachos, is unconvinced and is given the final words.
Philalethes: “When you say I, I, I want to exist, it is not you alone that says this. Everything says it, absolutely everything that has the faintest trace of consciousness. It is the cry not of the individual but of existence itself…. only thoroughly recognize what you are and what your existence really is, namely, the universal will to live, and the whole question will seem to you childish and most ridiculous.”
Thrasymachos: You’re childish yourself and most ridiculous, like all philosophers, and if a man of my age lets himself in for a quarter hour’s talk with such fools it is only because it amuses me and passes the time. I’ve more important business to attend to, so goodbye.
Schopenhauer had one further method of keeping death-anxiety at bay: death-anxiety is least where self-realization is most. If his position based on universal oneness appears anemic to some, there is little doubt about the robustness of this last defense. Clinicians who work with dying patients have made the observation that death-anxiety is greater in those who feel they have lived an unfulfilled life. A sense of fulfillment, at “consummating one’s life,” as Nietzsche put it, diminishes death-anxiety.
And Schopenhauer? Did he live rightly and meaningfully? Fulfill his mission? He had absolutely no doubt about that. Consider his final entry in his autobiographical notes.
I have always hoped to die easily, for whoever has been lonely all his life will be a better judge than others of this solitary business. Instead of going out amid the tomfooleries and buffooneries that are calculated for the pitiable capacities of human bipeds, I shall end happily conscious of returning to the place whence I started…and of having fulfilled my mission.
And the same sentiment—the pride of having pursued his own creative path—appears in a short verse, his authorial finale, the very last lines of his final book.
I now stand weary at the end of the road
The jaded brow can hardly bear the laurel
And yet I gladly see what I have done
Ever undaunted by what others say.
When his last book, Parerga and Paralipomena, was published, he said, “I am deeply glad to see the birth of my last child. I feel as if a load that I have borne since my twenty-fourth year has been lifted from my shoulders. No one can imagine what that means.”
On the morning of the twenty-first of September 1860 Schopenhauer’s housekeeper prepared his breakfast, tidied up the kitchen, opened the windows, and left to run errands, leaving Schopenhauer, who had already had his cold wash, sitting and reading on the sofa in his living room, a large airy, simply furnished room. On the floor by the sofa lay a black bearskin rug upon which sat Atman, his beloved poodle. A large oil painting of Goethe hung directly over the sofa, and several portraits of dogs, Shakespeare, Claudius, and daguerreo-types of himself hung elsewhere in the room. On the writing desk stood a bust of Kant. In one corner a table held a bust of Christoph Wieland, the philosopher who had encouraged the young Schopenhauer to study philosophy, and in another corner stood his revered gold-plated statue of the Buddha.
A short time later his physician, making regular rounds, entered the room and found him leaning on his back in the corner of the sofa. A “lung stroke” (pulmonary embolus) had taken him painlessly out of this world. His face was not disfigured and showed no evidence of the throes of death.
His funeral on a rainy day was more disagreeable than most due to the odor of rotting flesh in the small closed mortuary. Ten years earlier Schopenhauer had left explicit instructions that his body not be buried directly but left in the mortuary for at least five days until decay began—perhaps a final gesture of misanthropy or because of a fear of suspended animation. Soon the mortuary was so close and the air so foul that several of the assembled people had to leave the room during a long pompous obituary by his executor, Wilhelm Gwinner, who began with the words:
This man who lived among us a lifetime, and who nevertheless stayed a stranger amongst us, commands rare feelings. Nobody is standing here who belongs to him through the bond of blood; isolated as he lived, he died.
Schopenhauer’s tomb was covered with a heavy plate of Belgian granite. His will had requested that only his name, Arthur Schopenhauer, appear on his tombstone—“nothing more, no date, no year, no syllable.”
The man lying under this modest tombstone wanted his work to speak for him.
42
Three Years Later
* * *
Mankind has learned a few things from me which it will never forget.
* * *
The late-afternoon sun streamed through the large open sliding windows of the Café Florio. Arias from The Barber of Seville flowed from the antique jukebox accompanied by the hissing of an expresso machine steaming milk for cappuccinos.
Pam, Philip, and Tony sat at the same window table they had been using for their weekly coffee meeting since Julius’s death. Others in the group had joined them for the first year, but for the past two years only the three of them had met. Philip halted their conversation to listen to an aria and hum along with it. “‘Una voce poco fa,’ one of my favorites,” he said, when they resumed their conversation. Tony showed them his diploma from his community college program. Philip announced he was now playing chess two evenings a week at the San Francisco Chess Club—the first time he had played opponents face-to-face since his father’s death. Pam spoke of her mellow relationship with her new man, a Milton scholar, and also of her Sunday attendances at the Buddhist services at Green Gulch in Marin.
