The Schopenhauer Cure (32 page)

"So here comes good ole Pam back, and what does she do? Pulls

your cover! Turns out you've got a messy past. Real messy. You're not Mister Clean after all. In fact you really fucked Pam over. You're knocked off your pedestal. Now you got to be upset about this. And so what do you do? You come in here today and say to Julius: what's your secret life? You want to knock him off his pedestal, level the playing ground. Same page?"

Philip nodded slightly.

"That's the way I see it. Hell, what else could it be?"

Philip fixed his eyes on Tony and responded, "Your observations are not without merit." He turned and addressed Julius: "Perhaps I owe you an apology--Schopenhauer always warned against allowing our subjective experience to contaminate objective observation."

"And an apology to Pam? How about Pam?" asked Bonnie.

"Yes, I suppose. That too." Philip glanced fleetingly in her

direction. Pam looked away.

When it became apparent that Pam had no intention of responding, Julius said, "I'll let Pam speak for herself at her own pace, Philip, but as for me--no apology is necessary. The very reason you're here is to understand what you say and why you say it. And as for Tony's

observations--I think they're right on target."

"Philip, I want to ask you something," said Bonnie. "It's a question that Julius has asked me many times. "How'd you feel after you left the meeting the last couple of sessions?"

"Not good. Distracted. Even agitated."

"That's what I imagined. I could see that," said Bonnie. "Any

thoughts about Julius's final comment to you last week--about being given a gift by Stuart and Rebecca?"

"I didn't think about that. I tried but just felt tense. Sometimes I fear that all the strife and clamor here is a destructive distraction taking me away from the pursuits I really value. All this focus on the past and on our desires for change in the future only makes us forget the fundamental fact that life is nothing but a present moment, which is forever vanishing. What is the point of all this turmoil, given the ultimate destination of everything?"

"I see what Tony means about you never having any fun. It's so bleak," said Bonnie.

"I call it realism."

"Well, go back to that bit about life being only a present moment,"

Bonnie insisted. "I'm just asking about the present moment--your present response to being given a gift. Also, I've got a question about our postgroup coffee sessions. You charged out pretty quickly after the last two meetings. Did you think you weren't invited? No, let me put it this way: what is your present moment feeling about a coffee session after this meeting?"

"No, I am unaccustomed to so much talking--I need to recover. At the end of this meeting I will be very glad to be through for the day."

Julius looked at his watch. "We've got to stop--we're running over.

Philip, I won't forget my contract with you. You fulfilled your part. I'll honor mine next meeting."

27

_________________________

We
should set a limit

to our wishes, curb

our

desires,

and

subdue

our

anger,

always

mindful

of

the fact that the

individual

can

attain

only

an

infinitely

small

share of the things

that

are

worth

having...

_________________________

After the session the group gathered for about forty-five minutes at their usual Union Street coffee shop. Because Philip was not present, the group did not talk about him. Nor did they continue to discuss the issues raised in the meeting. Instead they listened with interest to Pam's lively description of her trip to India. Both Bonnie and Rebecca were intrigued by Vijay, her gorgeous, mysterious, cinnamon-scented train companion, and encouraged her to respond to his frequent e-mails. Gill was upbeat, thanked everyone for their support, and said that he was going to meet with Julius, get serious about abstinence, and begin AA. He thanked Pam for her good work with him.

"Go Pam," said Tony. "The tough-love lady strikes again."

Pam returned to her condo in the Berkeley hills just above the university. She often congratulated herself for having the good sense to hold on to this property when she married Earl. Perhaps, unconsciously, she knew she might need it again. She loved the blond wood in every room, her Tibetan scatter rugs, and the warm sunlight streaming into the living room in the late afternoon. Sipping a glass of Prosecco, she sat on her deck and watched the sun sink behind San Francisco.

Thoughts about the group swirled in her mind. She thought about Tony doffing the costume of the group jerk and, with surgical precision, showing Philip how clueless he was about his own behavior. That was priceless. She wished she had it on tape. Tony was an uncut gem--bit by bit, more of his real sparkle was becoming visible. And his comment about her dispensing "tough love"? Did he or anyone else sense how much the "tough" outweighed the "love" in her response to Gill? Unloading on Gill was a great pleasure, only slightly diminished by its having been helpful to him. "Chief justice," he had called her. Well, at least he had the guts to say that--but then he tried to undo it by unctuously complimenting her.

She recalled her first sight of Gill--how she was momentarily

attracted to his physical presence, those muscles bulging out of his vest and jacket, and how quickly he had disappointed her by his pusillanimous contortions to please everyone and his whining, his endless whining, about Rose--his frigid, strong-willed, ninety-five-pound Rose--who had the good sense, it now turns out, not to be impregnated by a drunk.

After only a few meetings Gill had assumed his place in the long line of male losers in her life, beginning with her father, who wasted his law degree because he couldn't stand the competitive life of an attorney and settled for a safe civil service position of teaching secretaries how to write business letters and then lacked the fortitude to fight the pneumonia that killed him before he could start drawing his pension. Behind him in line there was Aaron, her acne-faced high school gutless boyfriend who passed up Swarthmore to live at home and commute to the University of Maryland, the school nearest home; and Vladimir, who wanted to marry her even though he had never gotten tenure and would be a journeyman English composition lecturer forever; and Earl, her soon-to-be ex, who was phony all the way from his Grecian formula hair dye to his Cliff note mastery of the classics and whose stable of women patients, including herself, offered easy pickings; and John, who was too much of a coward to leave a dead marriage and join her. And the latest addition, Vijay? Well, Bonnie and Rebecca could have him! She couldn't rouse much enthusiasm for a man who would need an all-day equanimity retreat to recover from the stress of ordering breakfast.

But these thoughts about all the others were incidental. The person who compelled her attention was Philip, that pompous Schopenhauer clone, that dolt sitting there, mouthing absurdities, pretending to be human.

After dinner Pam strolled to her bookshelves and examined her

Schopenhauer section. For a time she had been a philosophy major and had planned a dissertation on Schopenhauer's influence on Becket and Gide. She had loved Schopenhauer's prose--the best stylist of any philosopher, save Nietzsche. And she had admired his intellect, his range, and his courage to challenge all supernatural beliefs, but the more she learned about Schopenhauer the person, the more revulsion she had felt.

She opened an old volume of his complete essays from her bookshelf and began reading aloud some of her highlighted passages in his essay titled "Our Relation to Others."

* "The only way to attain superiority in dealing with men is to let it be seen you are independent of them."

* "To disregard is to win regard."

* "By being polite and friendly, you can make people pliable and obliging: hence politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax."

Now
she remembered why she had hated Schopenhauer. And

Philip a counselor? And Schopenhauer his model? And Julius

teaching him? It was all beyond belief.

She reread the last aphorism:
"Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax."
Hmm, so he thinks he can work me like wax, undo what he did to my life with a gratuitous compliment on my comments about Buber, or allowing me to pass through a door first. Well, fuck him!

Later she tried to find peace by soaking in her Jacuzzi and

playing a tape of Goenka's chanting, which often soothed her with its hypnotic lilting melody, its sudden stops and starts and changes of tempo and timbre. She even tried Vipassana meditation for a few minutes, but she could not retrieve the equanimity it had once offered. Stepping out of the tub, she inspected herself in the mirror.

She sucked in her abdomen, elevated her breasts, considered her profile, patted her pubic hair, crossed her legs in an alluring pose.

Damn good for a woman of thirty-three.

Images of her first view of Philip fifteen years ago swiveled

into her mind. Sitting on his desk, casually handing out the class syllabus to students entering the room, flashing a big smile her way. He was a dashing man then, gorgeous, intelligent,

otherworldly, impervious to distractions. What the fuck happened to
that
man? And that sex, that force, doing what he wanted, ripping off my underwear, smothering me with his body. Don't kid yourself, Pam--you loved it. A scholar with a fabulous grasp of Western intellectual history, and a great teacher, too, perhaps the best she ever had. That's why she first thought of a major in

philosophy. But these were things he was never going to know.

After she was done with all these distracting and unsettling

angry thoughts, her mind turned to a softer, sadder realm: Julius's dying. There was a man to be loved. Dying, but business as usual.

How does he do it? How does he keep his focus? How does Julius keep caring? And Philip, that prick, challenging him to reveal himself. And Julius's patience with him, and his attempts to teach Philip. Doesn't Julius see he is an empty vessel?

She entertained a fantasy of nursing Julius as he grew

weaker; she'd bring in his meals, wash him with a warm towel,

powder him, change his sheets, and crawl into his bed and hold him through the night. There's something surreal about the group now--all these little dramas being played out against the darkening horizon of Julius's end. How unfair that he should be the one who is dying. A surge of anger rose within--but at whom could she

direct it?

As Pam turned off her bedside reading light and waited for

her sleeping pill to kick in, she took note of the one advantage to the new tumult in her life: the obsession with John, which had vanished during her Vipassana training and returned immediately after leaving India, was gone again--perhaps for good.

28

P

e

s

s

i

m

i

s

m

a

s

a

W

a

y

o

f

L

i

f

e

_________________________

No
rose without

a

thorn.

But

many

a

thorn

without a rose.

_________________________

Schopenhauer's major work,
The World as Will and

Representation,
written during his twenties, was published in 1818, and a second supplementary volume in 1844. It is a work of

astonishing breadth and depth, offering penetrating observations about logic, ethics, epistemology, perception, science,

mathematics, beauty, art, poetry, music, the need for metaphysics, and man's relationship to others and to himself. The human

condition is presented in all its bleakest aspects: death, isolation, the meaninglessness of life, and the suffering inherent in existence.

Many scholars believe that, with the single exception of Plato, there are more good ideas in Schopenhauer's work than in that of any other philosopher.

Schopenhauer frequently expressed the wish, and the

expectation, that he would always be remembered for this grand opus. Late in life he published his other significant work, a two-volume set of philosophical essays and aphorisms, whose book title,
Parerga and Paralipomena,
means (in translation from the Greek) "leftover and complementary works."

Psychotherapy had not yet been born during Arthur's

lifetime, yet there is much in his writing that is germane to therapy.

His major work began with a critique and extension of Kant, who revolutionized philosophy through his insight that we constitute rather than perceive reality. Kant realized that all of our sense data are filtered through our neural apparatus and reassembled therein to provide us with a picture that we call reality but which in fact is only a chimera, a fiction that emerges from our conceptualizing and categorizing mind. Indeed, even cause and effect, sequence, quantity, space, and time are conceptualizations, constructs, not entities "out there" in nature.