Exuberance: The Passion for Life (23 page)

Hashish likewise takes back the joy it first so enticingly gives, but the road to ruin is often a glorious one. “
Hashish spreads out over the whole of life a sort of veneer of magic,” wrote Charles Baudelaire. “Scalloped landscapes; fleeting horizons … the universality of all existence, arrays itself before you in a new and hitherto unguessed-at glory.” Paradise and heaven, the life of a god itself, are at the user’s beckoning: “A wild and ardent shout breaks from his bosom with such force [that it] would bowl over the angels scattered on the paths of Heaven:
I am a God!
”

Théophile Gautier felt no less rapturous. The physician who
gave him hashish told him, “
This will be deducted from your share in Paradise,” and in Paradise—for a quick while—he was, filled with the “maddest gaiety.” “What bliss! I’m swimming in ecstasy! I’m in Paradise! I’m plunging into the depths of delight!” The human frame, he said prophetically, “could no longer have borne such intensities of happiness.” Indeed, neither his frame nor Baudelaire’s proved an exception to pharmacological law: what goes up must come down. It is a law ignored anew by each generation of pleasure seekers; some pay more for ignoring it, others less. Cocaine, hashish, opium, Ecstasy: all seduce with the promise of rapture or exuberance—and then they collect.

In group celebrations, we find exuberance differently.
A love of festivities is universal, observed William James, and in many respects celebration is yet another form of human play. The same acts are experienced more intensely when performed in a crowd than when done alone. In a large and festive group, our actions build in response to those around us; they reverberate and gather energy. Celebrations are not as circumscribed as more ritualized and formal group gatherings; improvisation, playfulness, and exuberance hold sway. We celebrate the end of precarious times—war and winter, for example—and times of great accomplishment: Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, a footstep on the moon, or a political candidate’s success.

The intensity of exuberance varies of course, depending upon the size of the group and whether the celebration is of a private or a more public nature. Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, contrasts the kind of exuberance he and his crew felt after surviving combat in World War II with the raucous celebration that he and everyone else in the convention hall shared the night he was nominated.
As a bomber pilot, he says, he felt exuberant anytime he and his crew survived heavy antiaircraft fire and returned safely to their base. (This was especially true after
he had had to land his four-engine B-24 bomber with only two engines operating and on a runway only half as long as needed for a safe landing, a feat for which he received the Distinguished Flying Cross.) A gentler exuberance accompanied his return home after his combat duty was over: “At the end of my 35 missions, flying high over the Atlantic with my crew asleep and [myself] at the controls, I looked at a full moon, lovely white clouds and the ocean below and the war over for me—a wonderful sense of peace, and satisfaction and exuberance came over me. We had done our job well, [although] our navigator had been killed in combat and one of our gunners had been wounded and stayed behind in an Italian hospital. The rest of us were well and healthy and were reflecting on soon seeing our families. It was a quiet exuberance that I’ll never forget.”

The exuberance McGovern experienced on his nomination in 1972 was very different: “
It is difficult for me to imagine a feeling that could transcend the feelings of exuberance that swept my heart and mind and indeed my entire being upon being nominated as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. I watched the nomination from my hotel in Miami, in a room with a few staffers. Eleanor [McGovern’s wife] was on the convention floor with other members of my family. Television captured the exuberance of the crowd for me and greatly added to my own. I believe the greatest feeling for me came the next night when early in the morning (2 a.m.) I went to the Convention for the first time to give my acceptance address. The tremendous applause, the shouts of sheer joy, the demonstrations, including dancing in the aisles, the hundreds of joyful embraces of the delegates—this was the highlight of exuberance for me.”

We celebrate national occasions of moment. John Adams, in a letter to his wife, Abigail, written on the third of July 1776, wrote: “
I am apt to believe that [Independence Day] will be celebrated by
succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary festival.… It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations, from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Adams’s use of “solemnized” in the context of bells and bonfires is a telling one. The attachment of joy to the marking of profound events is signal: it ties pleasure to recollection and makes more likely the perpetuation of the occasion thought significant enough to be remembered. Towns are bound together by joy, the country united in common cause and recollection.

The American observance of independence from Britain continues more than 225 years after the fact, with defining elements taken from the earliest celebrations. Eighteenth-century Boston celebrated the nation’s independence with cannon fire and gun salutes from the ships in Boston Harbor. A sermon to the state assembly was followed by thirteen toasts, one for each of the new states, proposed by Governor John Hancock; the militia paraded and, at night, fireworks exploded over the city. A century later, the abolitionist and suffragist Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” described the Fourth of July celebrations held in her native New York: “
The endless crackling of torpedoes, the explosion of firecrackers and the booming of cannon,” she wrote, “made the day one of joyous confusion.… It then seemed to be a day wholly devoted to boyish pleasure and mischief.” There was, she reported, “a perpetual popping and fizzing [and] shouts of merriment,” and, later that night “Roman candles, blue lights, and rockets.” On the Fourth of July in 2000, yet another century later, an estimated 5 million people crowded to watch 120 tall ships and forty warships parade past New York Harbor. There was a clear continuity with the first celebrations of the nation’s birth: great sailing ships and pealings of church bells, community parades during the day, and fireworks at night.

Fireworks have ignited festive moods for more than two thousand years. A primitive alliance between man and fire, between darkness and light, fireworks are the perfect display of human rejoicing: we send up rockets of light into the sky and they burst into blazing bits of dazzling beauty. Our moods ride with them. Fireworks create magic and bring together those watching them into an ebullient, alert, and awe-filled state; they inspire a shared sense of wonder, of beauty, of excitement. They splash the night world with sound and color. As Barnum knew, the world needs to celebrate; it needs someone to “throw up sky-rockets.” It is in our nature to rejoice in and with those who do.

(photo credit 7.1)

T
he pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive. Early humans survived and then flourished because some took keen notice of the habits of prey and predator while yet others explored to advantage their terrain and the land beyond. A few watched the night skies, traced the movement of the stars, named the constellations, and reckoned the progression of the moon, the sun, and the seasons.

What drew these observers and explorers to their watch and mullings? What pulled them to imagine and wonder about new worlds or new ways of understanding: to count, describe, make sense of, predict? Why did Hipparchus look upward and name the stars while tens of thousands of others slept? What compelled Archimedes to calculate the mathematical properties of spirals and spheres, or Gauss to approach infinity and presume to grapple with it? They had imaginative and audacious minds, certainly. But they also had passion and energy; they took joy in discovering something new. Nature rewards the enthusiastic and curious with excitement in the chase and the thrill of discovery, rewards the intellectually playful with the exuberant pleasures of play. Exuberance in science drives exploration and sustains the quest; it brings its own Champagne to the discovery.

Discovery is undeniably intoxicating and, in its own way, addictive as well, for exuberance experienced in the wake of discovery creates a fresh appetite to discover anew. The history of science is a history of delight in first-seens, first-postulateds, first-came-upons; it is a history of high pleasure in the hunt and of exultation in the netting. Being first is inebriating; it stokes the fire for the next seeking. The English paleontologist Richard Fortey, in his marvelous book
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
, describes the delight:

Most scientists and explorers relate comparable feelings of excitement after finding something no one else has seen before or understood. Susan Hendrickson, the discoverer of “Sue,” the great
Tyrannosaurus rex
named for her, told a
New York Times
reporter, “
When you’re the first person to see this creature, this magnificent, splendid, awesome creature that no living being has seen for 67 million years, it’s a thrill that defies description. It’s chemical, physical, emotional—it’s a body experience.” Elsewhere she elaborated: “
It’s the thrill of discovery.… It’s like the high from some drug. It lasts a few minutes. And it’s addictive. Those moments are few and far between, but that’s what keeps you going.” Hendrickson, who has been compared more than once to Indiana Jones, chases her enthusiasms all over the world. She has helped to raise Spanish galleons, found rare butterflies in amber, and participated in underwater expeditions to discover lost cities. To each adventure she brings her exuberance and a mother wit for discovery.

Richard E. Byrd, in
Skyward
, describes the excitement of discovery during his pioneering flight to the North Pole: “
We were now getting into areas never before viewed by mortal eye. The
feelings of an explorer superseded the aviator’s. I became conscious of that extraordinary exhilaration which comes from looking into virgin territory. At that moment I felt repaid for all our toil.… We were opening unexplored regions at the rate of nearly 10,000 square miles an hour, and were experiencing the incomparable satisfaction of searching for new land.”

The Nobel laureate Max Perutz compares discovery to falling in love or reaching the top of a mountain after a strenuous climb. It is, he says, “
an ecstasy induced not by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before.” The astronaut Buzz Aldrin said that when he and Neil Armstrong were waiting to leave the moon, he became aware that “
there was no runway up there. And there certainly wasn’t anyone else waiting in line to take off. I was conscious of that, of being first.”

The ecstasy of discovery is by no means limited to scientists, of course, although they are the focus of concentration here. Clearly, most individuals—athletes, lovers, artists, businessmen, journalists, parents—will experience moments of delight in discovery; they are threaded into the experimentation of play, individual triumphs in life, and the intensities of love. For artists and writers there is, in addition to the moments of imaginative discovery, a profound pleasure that comes from beauty. When Keats first read Chapman’s translation of Homer, he compared his emotions to one who, observing the heavens, sees for the first time what no one has ever seen before: “
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken,” he wrote. It is not surprising that Keats, who had studied to be a surgeon, turned to the natural sciences for an image of comparable intensity.