The Schopenhauer Cure (20 page)

of

anxiety,

craving,

anger, and fear) back and

forth in constant pain: all

these he has cut asunder. He

smiles and looks back calmly

on the phantasmagoria of this

world which now stands before

him as indifferently as chess—

men at the end of a game.

_________________________

It was a few days later at 3A.M. Pam lay awake, peering into the darkness. Thanks to the intervention of her graduate student, Marjorie, who had arranged VIP privileges, she had a semiprivate room in a tiny alcove with a private toilet just off the women's common dormitory. However, the alcove provided no sound buffer, and Pam listened to the breathing of 150 other Vipassana students. The whoosh of moving air transported her back to her attic bedroom in her parents' Baltimore home when she lay awake listening to the March wind rattling the window.

Pam could put up with any of the other ashram hardships--the 4A.M. wakeup time, the frugal vegetarian one-meal-a-day diet, the endless hours of meditation, the silence, the Spartan quarters--but the sleeplessness was wearing her down. The mechanism of falling asleep completely eluded her. How did she used to do it? No, wrong question, she told herself--a question that compounded the problem because falling asleep is one of those things that cannot be willed; it must be done unintentionally. Suddenly, an old memory of Freddie the pig floated into her mind. Freddie, a master detective in a series of children's books she hadn't thought about in twenty-five years, was asked for help by a centipede who could no longer walk because his hundred legs were out of sync.

Eventually, Freddie solved the problem by instructing the centipede to walk without looking at his legs--or even thinking about them. The solution lay in turning off awareness and permitting the body's wisdom to take over. It was the same with sleeping.

Pam tried to sleep by applying the techniques she had been taught in the workshop to clear her mind and allow all thoughts to drift away. Goenka, a chubby, bronze-skinned, pedantic, exceedingly serious and exceedingly pompous guru, had begun by saying that he would teach Vipassana but first he had to teach the student how to quiet his mind.

(Pam endured the exclusive use of the male pronoun; the waves of feminism had yet not lapped upon the shores of India.)

For the first three days Goenka gave instruction in the
anapana-sati
--mindfulness of breathing. And the days were long. Aside from a daily lecture and a brief question-and-answer period, the only activity from 4A.M. to 9:30P.M. was sitting meditation. To achieve full mindfulness of breathing, Goenka exhorted students to study in-breaths and out-breaths.

"Listen. Listen to the sound of your breaths," he said. "Be conscious of their duration and their temperature. Note the difference between the coolness of in-breaths and the warmth of out-breaths. Become like a sentry watching the gate. Fix your attention upon your nostrils, upon the precise anatomical spot where air enters and leaves."

"Soon," Goenka said, "the breath will grow finer and finer until it seems to vanish entirely, but, as you focus ever more deeply, you will be able to discern its subtle and delicate form. If you follow all my instructions faithfully," he said, pointing to the heavens, "if you are a dedicated student, the practice of
anapana-sati
will quiet your mind. You will then be liberated from all the hindrances to mindfulness: restlessness, anger, doubt, sensual desire, and drowsiness. You shall awaken into an alert, tranquil, and joyous state."

Mind-quieting was indeed Pam's grail--the reason for her pilgrimage to Igatpuri.

For the past several weeks her mind had been a battlefield from which she fiercely tried to repel noisy, obsessive, intrusive memories and fantasies about her husband, Earl, and her lover, John. Earl had been her gynecologist seven years ago when she had become pregnant and decided upon an abortion, electing not to inform the father, a casual sexual playmate with whom she wished no deeper involvement. Earl was an uncommonly gentle, caring man. He skillfully performed the abortion and then provided unusual postoperative follow-up by phoning her twice at home to inquire about her condition.

Surely, she thought, all the accounts of the demise of humane, dedicated medical care were hyperbolic rhetoric. Then, a few days later, came a third call which conveyed an invitation to lunch, during which Earl skillfully negotiated the segue from doctor to suitor. It was during their fourth call that she agreed, not without enthusiasm, to accompany him to a New Orleans medical convention.

Their courtship proceeded with astonishing quickness. No man ever knew her so well, comforted her so much, was so exquisitely familiar with her every nook and cranny, nor afforded her more sexual pleasure. Though he had many wonderful qualities--he was competent, handsome, and carried himself well--she conferred upon him (she now realized) heroic, larger-than-life stature. Dazzled at being the chosen one, at being promoted to the head of the line of women packing his office clamoring for his healing touch, she fell wholly in love and agreed to marriage a few weeks later.

At first married life was idyllic. But midway into the second year, the reality of being married to a man twenty-five years older set in: he needed more rest; his body showed his sixty-five years; white hair appeared in defiance of Grecian formula hair dye.

Earl's rotator cuff injury ended their tennis Sundays together, and when a torn knee cartilage put an end to his skiing, Earl put his Tahoe house on the market without consulting her. Sheila, her close friend and college roommate, who had advised her not to marry an older man, now urged her to maintain her own identity and not be in a rush to grow old. Pam felt fast-forwarded. Earl's aging fed on her youth. Each night he came home with barely enough energy to sip his three martinis and watch TV.

And the worst of it was that he never read. How fluently, how confidently he had once conversed about literature. How much his love of
Middlemarch
and
Daniel Deronda
had endeared him to her. And what a shock to realize only a short time later that she had mistaken form for substance: not only were Earl's literary observations memorized, but his repertory of books was limited and static. That was the toughest hit: how
could
she have ever loved a man who did not read? She, whose dearest and closest friends dwelled in the pages of George Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch, Gaskell, and Byatt?

And that was where John, a red-haired associate professor in her department at Berkeley with an armful of books, a long graceful neck, and a stand-up Adam's apple, came in. Though English professors were expected to be well-read, she had known too many who rarely ventured out of their century of expertise and were complete strangers to new fiction. But John read everything. Three years before she had supported his tenure appointment on the basis of his two dazzling books,
Chess: The Aesthetics of Brutality in Contemporary Fiction
and
No Sir!: The Androgynous Heroine in Late Nineteenth-Century British Literature.

Their friendship germinated in all the familiar romantic academic haunts: faculty and departmental committee meetings, faculty club luncheons, monthly readings in the Norris Auditorium by the poet or novelist in residence. It took root and blossomed in shared academic adventures, such as team teaching the nineteenth-century greats in the Western civilization curriculum or guest lectures in each other's courses. And then permanent bonding took place in the trench warfare of faculty senate squabbles, space and salary sorties, and brutal promotion committee melees. Before long they so trusted each other's taste that they rarely looked elsewhere for recommendations for novels and poetry, and the e-mail ether between them crackled with meaty philosophical literary passages. Both eschewed quotations that were merely decorative or clumsily clever; they settled for nothing less than the sublime--beauty plus wisdom for the ages. They both loathed Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both loved Dickinson and Emerson. As their shared stack of books grew taller, their relationship evolved into ever greater harmony. They were moved by the same profound thoughts of the same writers. They reached epiphanies together. In short, these two English professors were in love.

"You leave your marriage, and I'll leave mine."
Who said it first? Neither could remember, but at some point in their second year of team teaching they arrived at this high-risk amorous commitment. Pam was ready, but John, who had two preteen daughters, naturally required more time. Pam was patient. Her man, John, was, thank God, a good man and required time to wrestle with such moral issues as the meaning of the marriage vow. And he struggled, too, with the problem of guilt at abandoning his children and how one goes about leaving a wife, whose only offense had been dullness, a wife transformed by duty from sparkling lover into drab motherhood. Over and over again John assured Pam that he was en route, in process, that he had successfully identified and reconnoitered the problem, and all he needed now was more time to generate the resolve and select the propitious moment to act.

But the months passed, and the propitious moment never arrived. Pam suspected that John, like so many dissatisfied spouses attempting to avoid the guilt and the burden of irreversible immoral acts, was trying to maneuver his wife into making the decision.

He withdrew, lost all sexual interest in his wife, and criticized her silently and, occasionally, aloud. It was the old "I can't leave but I pray that she leaves" maneuver.

But it wasn't working--this wife wouldn't bite.

Finally, Pam acted unilaterally. Her course of action was prompted by two phone calls beginning with "Dearie, I think you'd like to know..." Two of Earl's patients under the pretense of doing her a favor warned her of his sexual predatory behavior. When a subpoena arrived with the news that Earl was being sued for unprofessional behavior by yet another patient, Pam thanked her lucky stars she had not had a child, and reached for the phone to contact a divorce lawyer.

Might her act force John into decisive action? Even though she would have left her marriage if there had been no John in her life, Pam, in an astounding feat of denial, persuaded herself that she had left Earl for the sake of her lover and continued to confront John with that version of reality. But John dallied; he was still not ready. Then, one day, he took decisive action. It happened in June on the last day of classes just after an ecstatic love fest in their usual bower, an unrolled blue foam mattress situated partially under the tent of his desk on the hardwood floor of his office. (No sofas were to be found in English professors' offices; the department had been so racked by charges of professors preying on their female students that sofas had been banned.) After zipping up his trousers, John gazed at her mournfully. "Pam, I love you. And because I love you, I've decided to be resolute. This is unfair to you, and I've got to take some of the pressure off--off of you, especially, but off me as well. I've decided to declare a moratorium on our seeing one another."

Pam was stunned. She hardly heard his words. For days afterward his message felt like a bolus in her gut too large to digest, too heavy to regurgitate. Hour upon hour she oscillated between hating him, loving and desiring him, and wishing him dead. Her mind played one scenario after another. John and his family dying in an auto accident. John's wife being killed in an airplane crash and John appearing, sometimes with children, sometimes alone, at her doorstep. Sometimes she would fall into his arms; sometimes they would weep tenderly together; sometimes she would pretend there was a man in her apartment and slam the door in his face.

During the two years she had been in individual and group therapy Pam had profited enormously, but, in this crisis, therapy failed to deliver: it was no match for the monstrous power of her obsessional thinking. Julius tried valiantly. He was indefatigable and pulled endless devices out of his toolkit. First, he asked her to monitor herself and chart the amount of time she spent on the obsession. Two to three hundred minutes a day.

Astounding! And it seemed entirely out of her control; the obsession had demonic power.

Julius attempted to help her regain control of her mind by urging a systematic incremental decrease of her fantasy time. When that failed, he turned to a paradoxical approach and instructed her to choose an hour each morning which she would entirely devote to running the most popular fantasy reels about John. Though she followed Julius's instructions, the unruly obsession refused containment and spilled over into her thoughts just as much as before. Later he suggested several thought-stopping techniques.

For days Pam shouted no at her own mind or snapped rubber bands on her wrist.

Julius also attempted to defuse the obsession by laying bare its underlying meaning. "The obsession is a distraction; it protects you from thinking about something else," he insisted. "What is it concealing?" If there were no obsession, what would you be thinking about? But the obsession would not yield.

The group members pitched in. They shared their own obsessive episodes; they volunteered for phone duty so Pam could call them anytime she felt overcome; they urged her to fill her life, call her friends, arrange a social activity every day, find a man, and, for God's sake, get laid! Tony made her smile by requesting an application for that position. But nothing worked. Against the monstrous power of the obsession, all of these therapy weapons were as effective as a BB gun against a charging rhinoceros.

Then came a chance encounter with Marjorie, the starry-eyed graduate student cum Vipassana acolyte, who consulted her about a change in her dissertation topic. She had lost interest in the influence of Plato's concepts of love in the works of Djuna Barnes.

Instead she had developed a crush on Larry, Somerset Maugham's protagonist in
The Razor's Edge,
and now proposed the topic of "Origins of Eastern Religious Thought in Maugham and Hesse." In their conversations Pam was struck by one of Marjorie's (and Maugham's) pet phrases, "the calming of the mind." The phrase seemed so enticing, so seductive. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that
mind-calming
was exactly what she needed. And since neither individual nor group therapy seemed capable of offering it, Pam decided to heed Marjorie's advice. So she booked airline passage to India and to Goenka, the epicenter of mind-calming.