Read Exuberance: The Passion for Life Online
Authors: Kay Redfield Jamison
Exuberance: The Passion for Life (41 page)
Even under the most unforgivable circumstances, some joy and defiance exist. In 1850, Frederick Douglass said, “
I admit that the slave
does
sometimes sing, dance, and appear to be merry. But what does this prove? It only proves to my mind, that though slavery is armed with a thousand strings, it is not able entirely to kill the elastic spirit of the bondman. That spirit will rise and walk abroad, despite of whips and chains, and extract from the cup of nature, occasional drops of joy and gladness. No thanks to the slaveholder, nor to slavery, that the vivacious captive may sometimes dance in his chains, his very mirth in such circumstances, stands before God, as an accusing angel against his enslaver.” Even drops of joy abet defiance and make suffering more endurable.
Exuberance defies in strange and powerful ways; it asserts a future that others contrive to deny. Philippe Petit, a French juggler and acrobat, rigged a cable between the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center in 1974 and made eight crossings a quarter of a mile above the ground. He was exultant. “
I sit down on the wire, balancing pole on my lap. Leaning against the steel corner, I offer to myself, for a throne, the highest tower ever built by man; for a ceremonial carpet, the most savagely gigantic city of the Americas; for my dominion, a tray of seas wetting my forehead; while the folds of my wind-sculpted cape surround me with majestically mortal whirls. I rise, standing up on the wire.… I start walking. And walking, and walking.” It is a sacred expedition, he
chants to himself, a mythological journey. He calls out to the “
gods of the billion constellations”: “Watch closely. You’re not going to believe your zillion eyes.… Standing up again, I recognize I am at the top of the world, with all of New York City at my feet! How not to laugh with joy? I laugh with joy—and conclude the crossing with ecstasy instead of oxygen in my lungs.”
After the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, Philippe Petit offered up his song again. Defy, he said.
Fight terror with what is great in the human spirit. Build:
Let us print WE SHALL NOT BE DOOMED and paste the message high in the sky, for all in the world to read aloud.
Let us rebuild the twin towers.
We need the fuel of time and money, the mortar of ideas.…
Bring yours.
Here is mine.… Architects, please make them more magnificent—try a twist, a quarter turn along their longitudinal axes. Make them higher—yes, one more floor, so they reach III stories high.…
When the towers again twin-tickle the clouds, I offer to walk again, to be the expression of the builders’ collective voice. Together, we will rejoice in an aerial song of victory. I will carry my life across the wire, as your life, as all our lives, past, present, and future—the lives lost, the lives welcomed since.
We can overcome.
The future, to act in its fullest, needs all the exuberance it can call in. It is true, as President William Jefferson Clinton said, that we are a questing people, but questing—and the energy and enthusiasm
to fuel it—must be kept topped up. To explore requires vitality and curiosity; complaisance is death to discovery and to its attendant joy. If, as individuals or as a country, we stop pursuing new frontiers, become glutted on our past rather than drawn to the future, we will cease to be explorers. Exuberance is the headwater of motion, as it is of resilience; to lose our joy is to lose our ability to fight back and to advance. We have gone west and to the moon, but we need to bring a like passion to exploring the sea and the brain, to chasing comets and tracking down the first light in the universe, to writing symphonies and seeking social justice.
In 1962, President Kennedy said, “The United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward.” This is a theme returned to time and again, and with great eloquence, by Michael Collins, the
Apollo 11
astronaut who orbited the moon as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked it. He writes, in
Carrying the Fire
, that
our nation’s strength has always derived from our youthful pioneers.… Some people were never content to huddle in protective little clumps along the East Coast, but pushed westward as boldly as circumstances permitted. When horizontal exploration met its limits, it was time to try the vertical, and thus has it been since, ever higher and faster.
Now we have the capability to leave the planet, and I think we should give careful consideration to taking that option. Man has always gone where he has been able to go, it is a basic satisfaction of his inquisitive nature, and I think we all lose a little bit if we choose to turn our backs on further exploration. Exploration produces a mood in people, a widening of interest, a stimulation of the thought process, and I hate to see it wither.
Collins spoke to the same point in his address to the Congress not long after
Apollo 11
had returned to earth. “
Man has always gone where he has been able to go,” he said. “It’s that simple. He will continue pushing back his frontier, no matter how far it may carry him from his homeland.” The
Apollo 12
astronaut Alan Bean said much the same thing nearly thirty-five years later. Nothing, he declared, is going to change the “
inexorable motion of human beings off this planet and out into the universe.” For those of us who remember that magical July night in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin walked upon the moon as Collins circled it: we hope so.
Michael Collins describes his thoughts and the immensity of his solitude while orbiting the moon: “
I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully—not as fear or loneliness—but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling.” He starts to turn off the lights in
Columbia
so he can get some sleep and, as he looks around the spacecraft, he is taken back to his childhood days:
As I scurry about, blocking off the windows with metal plates and dousing the lights, I have almost the same feeling I used to have years ago when, as an altar boy, I snuffed out the candles one by one at the end of a long service. Come to think of it, with the center couch removed,
Columbia’s
floor plan is not unlike that of the National Cathedral, where I used to serve. Certainly it is cruciform, with the tunnel up above where the bell tower would be, and the navigation instruments at the altar. The main instrument panels span the north and south transepts, while the nave is where the
center couch used to be. If not a miniature cathedral, then at least it is a happy home, and I have no hesitation about leaving its care to God and Houston.
Five years later, a special service of commemoration and thanksgiving was held at the National Cathedral in Washington. A new stained-glass window, depicting swirling stars and orbiting planets floating in deep space, was dedicated. A narrow white line traces round the planets, representing the trajectory of a spacecraft. Carved near the window is a print of an astronaut’s boot on the surface of the moon, and embedded in the window itself is
a piece of lunar rock collected by the
Apollo 11
astronauts. Underneath the stars, at the bottom of the window in scarcely noticeable lettering, is an inscription taken from the book of Job: “
Is not God in the height of heaven?” It is a question Hipparchus must have asked and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin surely did.
We have, in echo of this, always sung up great hymns of praise and wonder to the heavens. We have joined our exuberance to that of nature and hoped, in some measure, that ours will be as generous. We recognize that the joyous need not only sanction but shield, that the possibility of renewal brings joy, and that renewal is in turn made more likely by joy. In the words of the nineteenth-century hymn, an exultant song rings triumphant over despair:
My life flows on in endless song;
Above Earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Through all the tumult and the strife
,
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
A passion for life is life’s ultimate affirmation. To ask the question is to know this to be so; it is to know that exuberance is a god within:
How can I keep from singing?
1.
“Shield your joyous ones”: Variations of this prayer appear in the Anglican
Book of Common Prayer, The Book of Common Prayer
of the U.S. Episcopal church, and the Church of Scotland’s “An Order of a Service of Healing.”2.
“Under every grief & pine”: William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” lines 61–62, in
The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and the Complete Poetry of William Blake
(New York: Random House, 1941), p. 598.3.
“The Greeks understood”: quoted in R. J. Dubos,
Louis Pasteur
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), p. 391.4.
as the psalm promises: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” Psalms 30:5.5.
“Why should man want to fly at all?”: Charles A. Lindbergh,
The Spirit of St. Louis
(1953; New York: Scribners, 2003), p. 269.6.
“Our earliest records”: Charles A. Lindbergh,
Autobiography of Values
(1976; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 352.7.
“create infectious enthusiasm”: Lou Dobbs said of Ted Turner, “He is a natural-born leader. I once asked him his definition of a leader. He said, ‘A leader has the ability to create infectious enthusiasm.’ ” Quoted in Ken Auletta, “The Lost Tycoon,”
The New Yorker
, April 23 and 30, 2001, p. 148.8.
Life for Theodore Roosevelt: In addition to the specific works cited, the following general works, among others, were consulted for the section on Theodore Roosevelt: Corrinne Roosevelt Robinson,
My Brother Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Scribners, 1921); Carleton Putnam,
Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858–1886
(New York: Scribners, 1958); William H. Harbaugh,
The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Edmund Morris,
The Rise of Roosevelt
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979); David McCullough,
Mornings on Horseback
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981); H. W. Brands,
TR: The Last Romantic
(New York: Basic Books, 1997); Edmund Morris,
Theodore Rex
(New York: Random House, 2001).9.
“unpacking of endless Christmas stockings”: Mrs. Winthrop Chanler,
Roman Spring: Memoirs
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), p. 195.10.
“literally delirious joy”: Theodore Roosevelt,
An Autobiography
(1913; New York: Da Capo, 1985), p. 7.11.
“who knows the great enthusiasms”: Theodore Roosevelt,
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt
, 20 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1928), vol. 13, pp. 506–29.12.
“I never knew any one”: Roosevelt,
Autobiography
, p. 9.13.
“went by in a round”: ibid., p. 7.14.
“What an excitement”: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to his mother, April 28, 1868, in
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt
, 8 vols., ed. E. E. Morison, J. M. Blum, and J. J. Buckley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–54), vol. 1, p. 3.15.
One debutante said: Nathan Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt: A Life
(New York: William Morrow, 1992), quoted on p. 72.16.
“unquenchable gaiety”: ibid., pp. 61–62.17.
“I should almost perish”: Theodore Roosevelt, diary entry, February 12, 1878, in
Theodore Roosevelt’s Diaries of Boyhood and Youth
(New York: Scribners, 1928).18.
“Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss”: Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt
, p. 81.19.
“He’ll kill himself”: quoted in Edmund Morris,
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
(1979; New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 75.20.
“I am of a very buoyant temper”: letter from Theodore Roosevelt to his sister, March 3, 1878,
Letters
, vol. 1, p. 32.21.
“rose like a rocket”: letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., October 20, 1903,
Letters
, vol. 3, p. 635.22.
“You could not talk to him”: Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt
, p. 157.23.
“The light has gone out”: Roosevelt, diary entry, February 14, 1884, in
Diaries
.24.
“black care rarely sits”: Theodore Roosevelt,
Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
, in
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt
, National Edition (New York: Scribners, 1926), vol. 1, p. 329; first published in 1888. He wrote, “These long, swift rides in the glorious spring mornings are not soon to be forgotten. The sweet, fresh air, with a touch of sharpness thus early in the day, and the rapid motion of the fiery little horses combine to make a man’s blood thrill and leap with the sheer buoyant lightheartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and freedom of the life he is leading” (ibid.).25.
“We felt the beat”: Roosevelt,
Autobiography
, p. 95.26.
“I enjoyed life to the full”: ibid., p. 96.27.
“wanted to put an end”: Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt
, p. 205.28.
“I curled up on the seat”: quoted in Morris,
Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
, p. 493.29.
“energy and enthusiasm”: Richard Harding Davis, quoted in Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt
, p. 284.30.
“bully,” “the great day”: Roosevelt’s account of the war is given in Theodore Roosevelt,
The Rough Riders
, in
Works
, National Edition, vol. 11, p. 81; first published in 1899.31.
“The President goes from one to another”: William Bayard Hale,
A Week in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Putnam, 1908).32.
“You go into Roosevelt’s presence”: Mark Sullivan,
Our Times: 1900–1925
, 6 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1926–35), vol. 3, p. 81.33.
“You must always remember”: Cecil Spring-Rice was Roosevelt’s best man when he married Edith Carow. His comment about Roosevelt is quoted in Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt
, p. 50.34.
“surrounded him as a kind of nimbus”: Lawrence F. Abbott,
Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Doubleday, Page, 1919), p. 267. Abbott also said that no individual “in modern times touched so many and so varied fields of activity in human life with such zest and vitality” (p. 266).35.
“fully intended to make science my life-work”: Roosevelt,
Autobiography
, p. 26.36.
Native bison herds were decimated: Paul Russell Cutright,
Theodore Roosevelt: The Naturalist
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 2.37.
“Ever since man”: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Conservation of Wild Life,”
The Outlook
, January 20, 1915, in
Works
, National Edition, vol. 12, p. 424.38.
“There can be no greater issue”: Theodore Roosevelt, “A Confession of Faith,” address to the National Convention of the Progressive Party, August 6, 1912, in
Works
, National Edition, vol. 17, pp. 293–94.39.
“He is doubtless the most vital man”: John Burroughs,
Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), pp. 60–61. Another friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, said shortly after Roosevelt died: “He touched a subject and it suddenly began to glow as when the high-power electric current touches the metal and the white light starts forth and dazzles the onlooking eyes. We know the air played by the Pied Piper of Hamelin no better than we know why Theodore Roosevelt thus drew the interest of men after him. We only know they followed wherever his insatiable activity of mind invited them.” Address of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in Honor of Theodore Roosevelt, Before the Congress of the United States, February 9, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 44.40.
“there would be little ground left”: quoted in Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt
, p. 470.41.
“During the seven and a half years”: Roosevelt,
Autobiography
, pp. 434–35.42.
“Wild beasts and birds”: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Conservation of Wild Life,” in
Works
, National Edition, vol. 12, pp. 423–31; quote on p. 425.43.
“A grove of giant redwoods”: Theodore Roosevelt,
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
(New York: Scribners, 1923); published in
Works
, vol. 4, p. 227.44.
“It is not the critic who counts”: Roosevelt,
Works
, vol. 13, pp. 506–29.45.
“When I was a boy in Scotland”: John Muir,
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
, in
The Wilderness Journeys
(1913; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), pp. 1, 23.46.
“flying to the woods”: ibid., p. 130.47.
“My eyes never closed”: ibid.48.
“University of the Wilderness”: ibid., p. 132.49.
“glorious botanical and geological excursion”: ibid. Muir said that the excursion, looking back on it, “lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free … urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty” (ibid.).50.
“glowing with Heaven’s unquenchable enthusiasm”: John Muir,
My First Summer in the Sierra
, in
The Wilderness Journeys
(1911; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), pp. 59, 63.51.
“Our camp grove fills”: ibid., p. 71.52.
“joyful, wonderful, enchanting”: ibid., p. 90.53.
“I shouted and gesticulated”: ibid., p. 66.54.
“Exhilarated with the mountain air”: ibid., p. 51.55.
“rocking and swirling”: John Muir, “A Wind-Storm in the Forest,” in John Muir,
The Mountains of California
(New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 183; first published as “A Wind Storm in the Forest of the Yuba,”
Scribner’s Monthly
, November 1878.56.
“so noble an exhilaration of motion”: ibid.57.
“Muir at once went wild”: Samuel Hall Young,
Alaska Days with John Muir
, in
John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings
, ed. T. Gifford (London: Bâton Wicks, 1996), p. 627.
Alaska Days
was first published in 1915.58.
“I feel as if driven”: Letter from John Muir to Sarah Muir Galloway, February 26, 1875, in Gifford,
Life and Letters
, pp. 215–16.59.
“Every summer my gains”: Letter from John Muir to Louie Wanda Strentzel, October 1879, ibid., p. 249.60.
“Do behold the King”: Letter from John Muir to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, n.d. [probably 1870], ibid., pp. 139–40.61.
“There is a balm”: ibid., p. 140.62.
“He sung the glory of nature”: Robert Underwood Johnson, quoted ibid., p. 873. (“John Muir as I Knew Him,” talk given before the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, January 6, 1916.)63.
“Muir was always discovering”: Young,
Alaska Days
, p. 647.64.
“How often have I longed for”: ibid., p. 678.65.
“To have explored with Muir”: Charles Keeler, “Recollections of John Muir,” in Gifford,
Life and Letters
, p. 880.66.
Muir’s was the most original mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Graham White’s introduction to
The Wilderness Journeys
, p. vi.67.
“spell of fire and enthusiasm”: Marion Randall Parsons, “John Muir and the Alaska Book,”
Sierra Club Bulletin, 1
0: 33–34 (1916). Theodore Roosevelt also commented on Muir’s verbal persuasiveness: “John Muir talked even better than he wrote. His greatest influence was always upon those who were brought into close personal contact with him.” Quoted in Stephen Fox,
John Muir and His Legacy
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), p. 126.68.
“I write to you personally”: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to John Muir, 1903, quoted in Paul Russell Cutright,
Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 247.69.
“I had a perfectly glorious time”: Letter from John Muir to his wife, in William Frederic Badè,
The Life and Letters of John Muir
, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), vol. 2, p. 412.70.
“I fairly fell in love with him”: Letter from John Muir to C. Hart Merriam, ibid.71.
“I trust I need not tell you”: quoted in Cutright,
Making of a Conservationist
, pp. 115–16.72.
an additional sense of urgency: On Muir’s death, Roosevelt said “he was also—what few nature-lovers are—a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects to which he had devoted his life. He was a great factor in influencing the thought of California and the thought of the entire country so as to secure the preservation of those great natural phenomena—wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides.… [O]ur generation owes much to John Muir” (January 6, 1915). Roosevelt,
Works
, vol. 12. p. 566.