The Interpretation Of Murder

    
In
1909, Sigmund Freud, accompanied by his then disciple Carl Jung, made his one
and only visit to the United States, to deliver a series of lectures on
psychoanalysis at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The honorary doctoral
degree that Clark awarded him was the first public recognition Freud had ever
received for his work. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud always
spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States.
He called Americans 'savages' and blamed his sojourn there for physical
ailments that afflicted him well before 1909. Freud's biographers have long
puzzled over this mystery, speculating whether some unknown event in America
could have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction.

    There is no mystery to happiness.

    Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound
they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark
of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to
it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does
not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

    But there's the rub. The present can
never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the
same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live
for
the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his
secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for
the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before
us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

    For myself, I have always chosen
meaning. Which, I suppose, is how I came to be waiting in the swelter and mob
of Hoboken harbor on Sunday evening, August 29, 1909, for the arrival of the
Norddeutsche Lloyd steamship
George Washington,
bound from Bremen,
carrying to our shores the one man in the world I wanted most to meet.

    At 7 p.m. there was still no sign of
the ship. Abraham Brill, my friend and fellow physician, was waiting at the
harbor for the same reason as I. He could hardly contain himself, fidgeting and
smoking incessantly. The heat was murderous, the air thick with the reek of
fish. An unnatural fog rose from the water, as if the sea were steaming. Horns
sounded heavily out in the deeper water, their sources invisible. Even the
keening gulls could be only heard, not seen. A ridiculous premonition came to
me that the
George Washington
had run aground in the fog, her
twenty-five hundred European passengers drowning at the foot of the Statue of
Liberty. Twilight came, but the temperature did not abate. We waited.

    All at once, the vast white ship
appeared - not as a dot on the horizon, but mammoth, emerging from the mist
fullblown before our eyes. The entire pier, with a collective gasp, drew back
at the apparition. But the spell was broken by the outbreak of harbormen's
cries, the flinging and catching of rope, the bustle and jostle that followed.
Within minutes, a hundred stevedores were unloading freight.