Christian Nation (4 page)
Sanjay practiced yoga every day. Early each morning, usually starting while I was still asleep, he unrolled a thin green rubbery mat in the center of our living room and proceeded through the identical sequence of yoga postures. Most mornings I awoke to the sounds of his breathing—slightly constrained extended inhales and exhales that accompanied his movement. While engaged in this practice, including ten minutes of motionless meditation, he was oblivious to the noise and commotion of the dorm. At the end, he was always covered in a thin layer of sweat.
One morning I woke up unusually early, when Sanjay was just starting his practice. I passed through the living room in my boxer shorts on the way to the bathroom down the hall. For the first time, Sanjay stopped what he was doing. He looked uncertain, and then said, “May I teach you?” This was a surprise, as a kind of invisible wall had always descended around Sanjay when he was doing his yoga. Each time before this, when Sanjay was practicing, we had both behaved as if the other was simply not present.
“Sure,” I said.
We stood side by side as he patiently taught me to breathe deeply through the nose, find the rooted ease of mountain pose, and then progress through the simple sun salutations with which he started his practice. He made adjustments to my posture, pulling my hips back to achieve an arched lower back in down-dog, and pushing the upper back to a flat and relaxed position—adjustments that allowed me to get a glimpse of the energy released by proper alignment. By the end of the hour, I too was covered in sweat. At the end, we sat with folded legs facing each other.
“G, I want you to understand. You need to understand what yoga means to me. You cannot really know me otherwise.”
Yoga, he told me that morning, was not a religion, and it had no supernatural elements. Nor was it a purely physical practice, although many Americans enjoyed it only at that level. Instead, he said, it was a system of external “cleansing” practices that laid the foundation for internal mental practices. The external practices included yama, or the determination to live an ethical life; niyama, a type of enhanced self-awareness; and then—what I saw him doing every day—a physical practice of asanas, or postures, accompanied by controlled breathing. These, Sanjay explained, laid the foundation for the mental practices—concentration and meditation—which in turn could lead to
Samadhi
, which was, he admitted, something like the Buddhist nirvana, but was really just an advanced state of meditation that brings an insightful understanding of a person’s oneness with the rest of that which exists. He had not, he assured me, reached
Samadhi
, nor did he expect he ever would.
“So,” I asked, “what’s the point? I mean, why devote an hour a day to practicing if you’re never going to cross the finish line?”
Sanjay laughed in a way that never gave you the sense that he was laughing
at
you. He did not laugh at the misfortune or embarrassment of others. He laughed like a child at things that were silly, and laughed when he saw—sometimes by himself—the deep humor in a situation. He never laughed out of politeness when others saw humor that he did not, but his own laugh was unusually infectious.
“I like that, G,” he answered, laughing, “… ‘the finish line.’ Apt. You know that Indian culture is patient and accepting of destiny. But you have spotted that there is, in much of yoga tradition, a striving for result, including the ultimate result of
Samadhi
. I prefer another strain that puts more emphasis on simply doing without striving. I want to live an ethical life and a life that is well suited to the person I am. I have discovered within myself a strong moral compass, and it is difficult to enjoy serenity while engaging in immoral acts.”
“So you are striving for serenity, then?” I asked, provocatively. Sanjay spoke quite a bit about serenity. It was ironic at the time, since college life is anything but serene. And it would prove to be a fruitless quest for my friend, whose ethical impulse led him to a life filled, externally at least, with drama, agitation, and, ultimately, suffering.
He ignored my provocation and continued his answer. “I admit, the postures and breathing make my body strong and healthy, and clear the mind. But even these things, although desirable, are not really desired as ends in themselves. Yoga, G, is not about striving. For me, desiring
Samadhi
would be wrong—as wrong as being good only because you desire the eternal reward of heaven or merely wish to avoid the punishment of hell. I agree there is a contradiction. Think of it this way, perhaps. You are walking down a road aware of the fact that at the end of the road there is a city. In one sense, the city is your destination, since if you keep walking along the road you will arrive there. But the fact is, that is not
why
you are on the road. You are on the road because you are a walker who wishes to take a walk on that road; you wish only to live in the moment, and walk well. I am sorry. I understand that this is not an altogether satisfactory answer.”
It wasn’t, and I had a hard time getting my mind around Sanjay’s relationship with yoga. It was such a central part of his life and one that I didn’t share. I envied Sanjay the equilibrium and peace of mind that was so obvious to all who knew him. He was often alone, and almost never lonely. I, on the other hand, was not—am not—an introspective person. As a young man, I did harbor a secret fear that I was a superficial person whose shallowness was well disguised by a glib cleverness. But I don’t think that now.
I don’t want to write about college. Princeton itself was a kind of nirvana, but like all temporal and physical varieties of paradise, it passed quickly. And I have always been profoundly vulnerable to the pain of loss and change.
My choice to go to law school did show a latent self-awareness. I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but I was right to intuit that I would be a good lawyer. I am a linear organized thinker, comfortable with abstraction and with a knack for insight. Good with words, and disciplined when I need to be. Of course, law school was also a safe choice. So safe as to be almost a non-choice. So like me at the time. Maintaining options, taking few risks.
Sanjay, in contrast, showed no interest in any of the conventional options. I overheard him on the phone one night with this father.
“Yes, Father. It is true that I could get into Harvard Medical School.”
He listened impassively.
“Yes, I do want to help people and be a responsible member of society.”
He saw I was listening, but he did not wink or grimace. When his words were attentive and respectful, he
was
attentive and respectful.
“I do not know, and yes, I agree with you that I am not ambitious. Respectfully, Father, I do not believe that ambition is an altogether good and safe thing. You misunderstand yoga. It is not passive. It accepts what we must accept, and arms us to engage with the world in a positive way. That is my ambition.”
The day after graduation, when Sanjay and I drove out of Princeton headed for New York City and the rest of our lives, I was gripped by a deep sadness and unsuccessfully tried to stifle a few tears. Sanjay put his hand on my shoulder and said, “G, to be happy, you must always look forward.” And here I am now, risking everything to look backward.
By the time I graduated from law school three years later saddled with student loans from seven years of tertiary and graduate education, Sanjay was rumored by the press to be worth $100 million and had just appeared on a list of the hundred most successful twenty-somethings in the country. The source of his wealth and his fame was
You and I
, a social networking website that he founded and, like the most successful such ventures, was hard to explain and, when described, sounded highly improbable.
“All relationships,” Sanjay told me on the phone when I was taking a break from studying for my exams, “are bilateral. A social network of multiple individuals—a virtual community—is necessarily superficial. The other sites have it all wrong. The measure of success is not
how many
online friends or contacts you have, but the
quality
of the relationship you have with each individual.
You and I
is about deepening the online contact between two people. It is not a dating site. These are not romantic relationships. It is not necessarily even about friendship. It is about deep engagement with another mind and another character. And, most importantly, it does not make the mistake of all the other sites that base their networks on shared experience or shared interest. Zuckerberg has it all wrong, feeding the Facebook friending fetish with people who went to the same schools, grew up in the same town, or work at the same company. Relationships based on affinity are essentially narcissistic—it is like looking in a mirror.”
“But isn’t shared experience at the root of all sense of community? I mean, what’s the alternative?”
“In yoga we spend lots of time looking at our own minds. We know ourselves. What enriches and completes us are other minds that are different. And engagement with those minds is best achieved when both parties are at peace with themselves: centered, mindful, and open. That is the alternative. So while our site is not restricted to yogis, it is where we are starting. For among yogis, you are far less likely to find people for whom friendship is needy, grasping, and demanding. That is the gift of
You and I
.”
It was a gift that many people accepted gratefully. In 2003,
You and I
attained cult status among the thousands of young yogis in New York. It was, they claimed, the only “authentic” online experience, bucking the very essence of wired society by providing depth not breadth, and substance instead of spectacle. In an early interview, making an analogy to the slow food movement, Sanjay called his site the “slow web.” By 2004, he had reached a million members. Sanjay did not take advertising, and
You and I
had no source of revenue. He instead relied on donations from members to defray the costs of the site. Just before I graduated from law school and returned to New York to start my job at the firm, he sent me an e-mail: “Just been offered $80 million cash for
You and I
. How can this be? Please explain. You are coming to Wall Street, G; please be careful. I fear something is seriously wrong.”
I don’t see how you can be President … without a relationship with the Lord.
—President George W. Bush, 2005
The second coming of Christ is everything that I’m living for. And I hope the Rapture comes tomorrow.
—House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, 2007
America has no King but Jesus.
—Attorney General John Ashcroft, 2004
The Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States of America is a Christian Nation …
—Official platform, Republican Party
of the state of Texas, 2004
S
EVERAL MONTHS AFTER
STARTING WORK
at the law firm, I handled the closing of an initial public offering for a company that previously had been taken private by a private equity firm, entered Chapter 11 when it could not service the debt it incurred to fund its own acquisition, was again bought and re-leveraged by a different set of private equity firms, and was then being re-sold to the public. Nothing about that seemed to me to be unusual or untoward. It wasn’t that I failed to think about my work in any sort of larger context; I did. But what I thought was that facilitating the free flow of capital to where it was needed was a necessary and an even noble calling. After all, the removal of regulatory impediments to the free flow of capital had led to three consecutive economic booms, freed billions in emerging markets from poverty, created the wealth that brought New York back from the brink of disaster, and created the glamorous world city, of unprecedented energy and cultural vigor, that I enjoyed. So when I, with unbecoming self-importance, cleared the deal to close—harvesting $7 billion in cash from the public markets for the private equity firms that were our clients—I felt very good about my day.
It was on that early deal that I met Emilie Craig. She had just graduated from Tuck Business School and started as a vice president at Credit Suisse. With all that has happened, can I really see her again as I saw her back then? When I close my eyes, I cannot see her twenty-five-year-old face, but I do hear her twenty-five-year-old voice before it acquired the strain and exasperated edginess that later caused me such pain. That twenty-five-year-old voice was lively and fun. Our roles as the most junior team members on a big deal, and our mutual professional insecurity, formed the basis for an easy camaraderie. I kidded her about the unconventional spelling of her name, which was the result of a Francophile father. She joked and said I was the best lawyer with whom she (with all of three months’ experience) had ever worked. After the deal closed, I asked her out on a date.
Emilie looked great in a suit. At work, she was comfortable with the role of being a strong professional woman, but, like the suit, it was something she put on. The Emilie I first fell in love with was not the banker. Behind the amusingly flip and confident professional woman was a warm and sometimes vulnerable girl from a small town in the Midwest. She let me see that vulnerability, which for her was an act of great intimacy. I think it also contributed to the disproportion of her subsequent bitterness.
I cannot honestly say she had a great gift for friendship. But initially this did not matter, since we were lovers before we were friends. We had sex after our first date. Emilie was a free and uncomplicated lover. For both of us, sex became a critical part of coping with the stress of our new lives. And in many ways she communicated better and more honestly with her body than with her words. After a few months I convinced myself that I had fallen in love.
Nothing in Emilie’s past had caused her to care much about money. She went to business school because she was good with numbers. At the beginning, she and I looked at our new lives in New York with a degree of detachment, but it was a perspective that—for her—faded quickly. She proved to be a chameleon, efficiently absorbing and reflecting the tastes, prejudices, and values of the people whose world she had entered. I did so more slowly and less completely. And therein lay the root of our problem.