Exuberance: The Passion for Life (52 page)

83.
“Those of us in the air”: William Mitchell,
Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power—Economic and Military
(1925; New York: Dover, 1988), p. 71.

84.
“Napoleon studied the campaigns”: “Aeronautical Era,”
Saturday Evening Post
, December 20, 1924, p. 103.

85.
“The competition will be”: Mitchell,
Winged Defense
, p. 3.

86.
“Bold spirits that before wanted”: ibid., p. 8.

87.
“The old discipline”: William Mitchell,
Skyways: A Book on Modern Aeronautics
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1930), p. 65.

88.
“[t]he [Army’s] General Staff”: William Mitchell,
Memoirs of World War I
(New York: Random House, 1928), p. 195.

89.
“I have been asked”: Colonel Mitchell’s Statements on Government Aviation,
Aviation
, 19 (September 14, 1925), p. 318. The editor of
Aviation
noted that Mitchell’s remarks “represent the most daring indictment of the War and Navy departments ever made by an officer.”

90.
“He erred in believing”: Hurley,
Billy Mitchell
, p. 139.

91.
“Americans might well regard Mitchell”: ibid., p. 140.

92.
“began to feel the joy”: Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, VIII, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Viking, 1958), p. 212. Daedalus had warned Icarus of the temptation:

       
Remember
To fly midway, for if you dip too low
The waves will weight your wings with thick saltwater
,
And if you fly too high the flames of heaven
Will burn them from your sides. Then take your flight
Between the two
. (pp. 211–12)

 

93.
“Who cares that he fell”: Anne Sexton, “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph,” in
The Complete Poems
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 53. Likewise, John Burnside writes, “The things that fall / are what we treasure most.” From “Of Gravity and Light: (Icarus),” in
The Light Trap
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 35.

94.
“ ‘Gemini Four’ ”: Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton,
Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Race to the Moon
(Atlanta: Turner, 1994), p. 182.

95.
“One loses all misgivings”: Trevor Norton,
Stars Beneath the Sea: The Extraordinary Lives of the Pioneers of Diving
(London: Century, 1999), p. 213.

96.
“no easy matter”: David Weeks and Jamie James,
Eccentrics
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), p. 95.

97.
“[p]retty soon I decided”: Eric Hansen,
Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy
(New York: Random House, 2000), p. 36.

98.
“One morning she sat him down”: ibid., p. 37.

99.
“he or she has little choice”: ibid., pp. 60–61.

100.
“In a person of irritable temperament”: June Z. Fullmer,
Young Humphry Davy: The Making of an Experimental Chemist
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000), p. 67.

101.
“It seemed as though the refreshing breath”: Clifford Beers,
A Mind That Found Itself
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1908), p. 73.

102.
“Survival might often depend”: James Watson, interview with the author at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, December 8, 1993.

103.
more complexly express it in the arts and sciences: The complicated relationship between depressed and exalted states, and its bearing on the artistic imagination, is more extensively discussed in my
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
(New York: Free Press, 1993).

104.
“can never permanently get the upper hand”: Lucretius,
On the Nature of the Universe
, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin, 1951), pp. 76–77.

105.
“have a soft temperament”: Ernst Kretschmer, translated into English in J. D.
Campbell,
Manic-Depressive Disease: Clinical and Psychiatric Significance
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953), pp. 26–27.

106.
“the drummer takes the muffling handkerchief”: Ben Ratliff, “In the Sorrow, the Seeds of Joy,”
New York Times
, September 13, 2001.

107.
“two or three within”: George Gordon, Lord Byron,
Don Juan
, Canto XVII, stanza 11, in
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works
, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1986), vol. 5, p. 660.

108.
“listening to [Woolf]”: Christopher Isherwood, in
Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries
, ed. Joan Russell Noble (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), p. 178.

109.
“One would hand her”: Nigel Nicolson, ibid., p. 128.

110.
“I was aware”: Elizabeth Bowen, ibid., p. 49. To tell Virginia Woolf anything, added her friend Rose Macaulay, “was like launching a ship on the shifting waters of a river, which flashed back a hundred reflections, enlarging, beautifying, animating, rippling about the keel, filling the sails, bobbing the craft up and down on dancing waves, enlarging the small trip into some fantastic Odyssean voyage among islands of exotic flowers and amusing beasts and men” (ibid., p. 166).

111.
“No pen could convey”: Cynthia Asquith,
Portrait of Barrie
(New York: Dutton, 1954), p. 22.

112.
“A childlike mirth”: Edmund Gosse, “Robert Louis Stevenson: Personal Memories,” in
The Robert Louis Stevenson Companion
, ed. Jenni Calder (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1980), p. 45.

113.
“most robust and ordinary men”: Sidney Colvin, “Robert Louis Stevenson,” in
The Robert Louis Stevenson Companion
, p. 19.

114.
“brought into our lives”: Isobel Field (Belle Osbourne), “The Best of All Things at Grez,” in R. C. Terry,
Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections
(London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 69.

115.
“so gay and buoyant”: Lloyd Osbourne, “The Scotch Literary Mediocrity,” in Terry,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, p. 81.

116.
“excited a passionate admiration”: Andrew Lang, “Sealed of the Tribe of Louis,” in Terry,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, p. 60.

117.
“life carries swiftly before it”: Henry James, “Robert Louis Stevenson,” in
The Robert Louis Stevenson Companion
, pp. 82–83.

118.
“He [had] lighted up”: Henry James, letter to Fanny Stevenson, in
Henry James Letters
, ed. Leon Edel, vol. III: 1883–1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1980), p. 498.

119.
“When I came to London”: quoted in
Letters of J. M. Barrie
, ed. Viola Meynell (New York: Scribners, 1947), p. 250.

120.
“It was not in Louis”: quoted in
The Robert Louis Stevenson Companion
, p. 47.

121.
“he was as restless”: quoted ibid., p. 43.

122.
“a sort of uncommon celerity”: quoted in Terry,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, p. 58.

123.
“seems never to rest”: Henry Adams, “Queer Birds—Mighty Queer Ones Too,” in Terry,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, p. 158.

124.
“an insane stork”: quoted ibid., p. 160.

125.
“He was as active”: S. J. Whitnee, quoted in Frank McLynn,
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography
(London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 477.

126.
“mutable as the sea”: W. E. Henley, early draft of “Apparition,” quoted ibid., p. 91.

127.
“there were two Stevensons”: H. J. Moors,
With Stevenson in Samoa
(London: Small, Maynard and Co., 1910), p. 29.

128.
“It is in vain”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Crabbed Age and Youth,” in
The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 63; essay first published in 1877.

129.
“My childhood”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to William Archer, 1885, quoted in McLynn,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, p. 17.

130.
“The family evil”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Christmas Sermon” (New York: Scribners, 1900), p. 15.

131.
“a profound essential melancholy”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer,” in
The Lantern-Bearers
, pp. 213–15; essay first published in 1887.

132.
“At one moment”: McLynn,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, p. 83.

133.
“ah! what bonds we have”: Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to W. Craibe Angus, April 1891, in
The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson
, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol. 7: September 1890-December 1892 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 110.

134.
“I’m getting tired”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Baxter, January 16, 1873, in
Letters
, vol. 1: 1854-April 1874, pp. 271–72. In the same letter Stevenson describes his brain as “just like a wet sponge: soft, pulpy, and lying spread out, flat and flacid, over my eyes” (p. 271).

135.
“You will understand”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Frances Sitwell, September 12, 1873, ibid., vol. 1, p. 298.

136.
“If you knew how old I felt”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Frances Sitwell, November 21, 1873, ibid., vol. 1, p. 374.

137.
“The world is disenchanted”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Ordered South,” in
Essays and Poems
(London: J. M. Dent, 1992), p. 5; essay first published in 1874.

138.
“Black care was sitting”: Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Cevennes Journal: Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands
, ed. Gordon Golding (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1978), p. 107.

139.
“Insomnia is the opposite pole”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Edmund Gosse, July 1881, in
Letters
, vol. 3, p. 202.

140.
“devilish little left to live for”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Baxter, May 21, 1888, in
Letters
, vol. 6: August 1887-September 1890, p. 191.

141.
“Half of the ills”: Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in McLynn,
Robert Louis Stevenson
, p. 387.

142.
“Health I enjoy”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, August 19, 1890, in
Letters
, vol. 6, pp. 402–3.

143.
“Drinks plenty”: Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to J. M. Barrie, April 2 or 3, 1893, in
Letters
, vol. 8, p. 44.

144.
“every guarantee”: Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, Norton Critical Edition (1886; New York: Norton, 2003), p. 47.

145.
“certain impatient gaiety”: ibid., pp. 47–48.

146.
“I thus drew steadily nearer”: ibid., pp. 48–49.

147.
“younger, lighter, happier”: ibid., p. 50.

148.
“like a mill race”: ibid.

149.
“solution of the bonds of obligation”: ibid.

150.
“tenfold more wicked”: ibid.

151.
“screwed to the topmost peg”: ibid., p. 56.

152.
“contempt of danger”: ibid., p. 58.

153.
“spring headlong”: ibid., p. 52.

154.
“In these flashing revelations”: Herman Melville,
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
(1852; New York: Signet, 1964), p. 114.

155.
“Write with fury”: Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 380.

156.
“Keep your early enthusiasm”: Louis Pasteur, speech given at the opening of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, November 14, 1888, in René Valery-Radot’s
The Life of Pasteur, vol
. 2, trans. R. L. Devonshire (London: Constable, 1911), pp. 221–22.

1.
“It Is Not Down in Any Map”: Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
(1851; Berkeley: University of California, 1979), p. 57.

2.
“giddy humor”: William Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647
, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 23.

3.
“vast and unpeopled countries”: ibid., p. 25.

4.
“casualties of the sea”: ibid., p. 26.

5.
“sore sicknesses and grievous diseases”: ibid.

6.
“The very hearing of these things”: ibid.

7.
“All great and honourable actions”: ibid., p. 27.

8.
“It was granted the dangers were great”: ibid.

9.
“good and honourable”: ibid.

10.
“yet might they have comfort”: ibid.

11.
“This land was an enigma”: Willa Cather,
O Pioneers!
(1913; New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 15.

12.
“wanted to be let alone”: ibid., p. 10.

13.
“A pioneer should have imagination”: ibid., p. 33.

14.
“In a pack on his back”: Vachel Lindsay, “In Praise of Johnny Appleseed,” in
Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems
(Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, 1976), pp. 84–85.

15.
“Love’s orchards climbed”: ibid., p. 90.

16.
“He saw the fruits unfold”: ibid., p. 91. At the beginning of Douglas Dunn’s poem “The Apple Tree,” he quotes Martin Luther—“And if the world should end tomorrow, I still would plant my apple tree”—and then goes on to speak beautifully of perseverance, of holding on to the past and reaching out to the future:

Tonight I saw the stars trapped underneath the water
.
I signed the simple covenant we keep with love
.
One hand held out an apple while the other held
Earth from a kirkyard where the dead remember me
.

 

Douglas Dunn, “The Apple Tree,” in
New Selected Poems, 1964–2000
(London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 73.

17.
“at the hither edge”: Frederick Jackson Turner,
The Frontier in American History
(1920; New York: Dover, 1996), p. 3.

18.
“As they wrested their clearing”: ibid., p. 345.

19.
“coarseness and strength”: ibid., p. 37.

20.
“restless, nervous energy”: Jackson links restlessness to exuberance, as did Henry T. Buckle in his
History of Civilization
(London: John W. Parker & Son, 1869): “An exuberant and therefore a restless nation” (vol. III, pt. 1., p. 9).

21.
“flush with enthusiasm”: quoted in Turner,
Frontier
, p. 319.

22.
“From this hour I ordain myself”: Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” in
Leaves of Grass
(1855; New York: Norton, 1965), p. 151. Whitman, says Robert Louis Stevenson, “sees that, if the poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells us, are to be ‘hymns of the praise of things.’ They are to make for a certain high joy in living.” Robert Louis Stevenson, “Walt Whitman,” in
The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
, ed. J. Treglown (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 75; essay first published in 1878.

23.
“Here something was about to go wrong”: O
. E. Rölvaag,
Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie
(New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1999), p. 33; first published in the United States in 1927.

24.
“This vast stretch”: ibid., p. 41.

25.
“This formless prairie”: ibid., p. 43.

26.
“Where Per Hansa was”: ibid., p. 257.

27.
“Now it had taken possession”: ibid., pp. 48, 52–53.

28.
“such a zest for everything”: ibid., p. 56.

29.
“plow[s] and harrow[s]”: ibid.

30.
“He was never at rest”: ibid., pp. 125, 127, 128.

31.
“unchangeable—it was useless”: ibid., p. 149.

32.
“called forth all that was evil”: ibid., p. 174.

33.
“heeded not the light of the day”: ibid., p. 255.

34.
“seemed to reflect”: ibid., p. 179.

35.
“even louder in his optimism”: ibid., pp. 148–49.

36.
“they would all become wild beasts”: ibid., p. 215.

37.
“the power to create a new life”: ibid., p. 337.

38.
“As the mild spring weather set in”: ibid., p. 338.

39.
“He walked so lightly”: ibid., pp. 337–38.

40.
“It was as if nothing affected people”: ibid., pp. 485–86.

41.
Americans see enthusiasm: S. Sommers, “Adults Evaluating Their Emotions: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in
Emotion in Adult Development
, ed. C. Z. Malatesta and C. E. Izard (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1984), pp. 319–38.

42.
Optimism is a related and defining American trait: John Leland, “Why America Sees the Silver Lining,”
New York Times
, June 13, 2004.

43.
high rates of manic-depressive illness: B. H. Roberts and J. K. Myers, “Religion, National Origin, Immigration, and Mental Illness,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
, 153: 418 (1988); B. Malzberg, “Mental Disease Among Native and Foreign-Born Whites in New York State, 1949–1951,”
Mental Hygiene
, 48: 478–99 (1964); L. Rowitz and L. Levy, “Ecological Analysis of Treated Mental Disorders in Chicago,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
, 19: 571–79 (1968).

44.
“My ties and ballasts”: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in
Leaves of Grass
, p. 61. Whitman’s expansiveness found a match in that of his contemporary Melville: “Give me a condor’s quill!” he wrote. “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!”
(Moby-Dick
, p. 465).

45.
“I began to feel that I lived”: Charles A. Lindbergh,
The Spirit of St. Louis
(1953; New York: Scribners, 2003), pp. 261–62.

46.
he made an ironic exception: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” in
The Crack-up with Other Pieces and Stories
(London: Penguin, 1965), p. 29; essay first published in 1945.

47.
“New York had all the iridescence”: ibid., p. 22.

48.
“The buildings were higher”: ibid., p. 28.

49.
“bloated, gutted, stupid with cake and circuses”: ibid., p. 29.

50.
“a widespread neurosis”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in
The Crack-up
, p. 16; essay first published in 1931.

51.
“Something bright and alien”: ibid., p. 17.

52.
“We were somewhere in North Africa”: Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” p. 29.

53.
“had begun to disappear”: Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 16.

54.
“I began to realize”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up,” in
The Crack-up
, p. 42; essay first published in 1936.

55.
“an over-extension of the flank”: ibid., p. 48.

56.
“often approached such an ecstasy”: ibid., pp. 55–56.

57.
“It’s not much fun”: letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, March 15, 1958, quoted in Ian Hamilton,
Robert Lowell: A Biography
(New York: Random House, 1982), p. 253.

58.
“It takes just a moment”: Robert Lowell, “Balloon,” in
Robert Lowell: Collected Poems
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 987.

59.
“In all the woods”: Anonymous, “The Flora of the Somme Battlefield,”
Nature
, 100: 475 (1918). An irrepressible scientific curiosity came through as well: “The innumerable shell-hole ponds present many interesting features to the biologist. In July they were half-full of water, and abounded in water beetles and other familiar pond creatures, with dragonflies flitting around.… [O]ften growing out of the water were stout plants … and water grasses.”

60.
“It was the invisible and intangible spirit”: Peter Ackroyd,
London: The Biography
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 745.

61.
“London itself would rise again”: ibid., pp. 745–46.

62.
“I could no longer take any pleasure”: Joyce Poole,
Coming of Age with Elephants: A Memoir
(New York: Hyperion, 1996), pp. 232–33.

63.
“There were no roads here”: ibid., pp. 265–66.

64.
“I admit that the slave
does
sometimes sing”: Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Slavery, No. 1,” delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, December 1, 1850, in Frederick Douglass,
Selected Speeches and Writings
, ed. P. S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Y. Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), pp. 164–70.

65.
“I sit down on the wire”: Philippe Petit,
To Reach the Clouds: My High-Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers
(New York: North Point Press, 2002), p. 194.

66.
“gods of the billion constellations”: ibid., pp. 194–95.

67.
Fight terror: Two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington,
The Economist
harked back to the pioneering origins of America: “America’s response to the first sustained terrorist attack on its soil is balanced, level-headed and sensible.… The can-do pioneers who tamed a wild continent and then helped to win three world
confrontations have not disappeared after all.” Lexington, “America the Sensible,”
The Economist
, October 27, 2001, p. 34.

68.
“Let us print”: Petit,
To Reach the Clouds
, p. 241.

69.
“our nation’s strength”: Michael Collins,
Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys
(1974; New York: Bantam, 1989), p. 476.

70.
“Man has always gone”: ibid., p. 487.

71.
“inexorable motion of human beings”: Alan Bean, talk given at the National Museum of Naval Aviation, Pensacola, Fla., June 15, 2003. Bean’s comments are borne out by the level of public interest in space. A poll published by Britain’s ITN archive (the world’s largest collection of television news) revealed that Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk continued to be the most requested piece of film footage ever shown on television (“Moonwalk Footage Is Brits’ Favorite Clip,”
Washington Post
, September 3, 2003). In the first six weeks of 2004, NASA’s Mars websites registered more than 4.6 billion hits (“Space Sites Garner High Hits,”
USA Today
, February 17, 2004).

72.
“I am alone now”: Collins,
Carrying the Fire
, pp. 408–9.

73.
“As I scurry about”: ibid., p. 417.

74.
a piece of lunar rock: “We have completed the rock section for the Washington Cathedral. This section is from Apollo 11 rock number 10057 and is specific piece number 230. Using the average radius, thickness, and the average specific gravity of lunar rocks, we have calculated the weight of this section to be 7.18 grams. The rock, collected by Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, is a basalt, probably from a lava flow. From isotopic analysis, we believe this rock to have crystallized approximately 3.6 billion years ago. The mineral pyroxferroite, unknown from Earth, was discovered in this rock.” Memo from TL/Acting Lunar Sample Curator to NASA Headquarters, June 10, 1974 (from the archives of Washington National Cathedral).

75.
“Is not God”: “Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!” (Job 22:12).

76.
“My life flows on”: Robert Lowry, “How Can I Keep from Singing,” in
Bright Jewels for the Sunday School
(New York: Bigelow & Main, 1869), p. 16.
   Robert Louis Stevenson, in his prayer “For the Renewal of Joy”(from Vailima Prayers, reprinted in Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson,
Our Samoan Adventure
, ed. Charles Neider [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955], p. 247), wrote:

Look down, call upon the dry bones, quicken, enliven; re-create in us the soul of service, the Spirit of peace; renew in us the sense of joy.