Exuberance: The Passion for Life (37 page)

Many of the individuals portrayed by Weeks and James had symptoms of grandiose and delusional thinking, which are associated with mania, yet almost all were happy with their lives. They were exuberant, unusually assertive, and remarkably curious as well. Few were shy or timid. The authors struggled with the distinction between “vivid imaginings” and delusions; it was “
no easy matter,” they concluded, “to clarify the line of demarcation between eccentricity and mental illness.”

Eric Hansen, in
Orchid Fever
, also describes the thin line separating enthusiasm from pathological exuberance. He interviewed one orchid grower who had started off with a single windowsill plant but then, he told Hansen, “
[p]retty soon I decided I wanted another orchid. First a red one, then a pink one, then I had to have a white one with spots.… I couldn’t stop.… Now I have a 2,200-square-foot greenhouse with about 200,000 plants.” Another enthusiast talked about how his first wife couldn’t handle his obsession: “
One morning she sat him down at the breakfast table and explained that he would have to choose between his orchid collection and their marriage. ‘That’s the easiest decision I’ll ever make,’ he told her. ‘You’re out of here, baby!’ ”

Once a person has been “properly seduced” by the sight or
scent of an orchid, Hansen says, “
he or she has little choice but to collect or buy the plant, take it home, build a special enclosure for it, feed, water, and groom the thing, and then dote over the plant for years. These people usually park their cars on the street because their garages are filled to capacity with potting tables surrounded with commercial quantities of cork bark, oyster shell, crushed dolomite, sphagnum moss, twist ties, horticultural charcoal, several different types of fertilizers, insecticides, pots, baskets, respirators, protective rubber clothing, Perlite, tree ferns, and gardening stakes. These orchid people … cater to the needs of their beloved orchids with a single-minded devotion that blurs the line between love and lunacy.”

There is no absolute border between a delight in life and a delight that is a manifestation of a potentially pathological state such as mania. Sir Humphry Davy, in discussing the dangers of unskeptical enthusiasm, put it well: “
In a person of irritable temperament, when the organization is perfect, and the body in a state of perfect health, the spirits rise sometimes almost to madness, trains of pleasurable ideas producing raptures introduce themselves into the Mind, all the ideas of self excellence are enlarged.… He imagines himself to be the peculiar favourite of the Deity.… This enthusiasm tho’ rare at first[,] promoted and indulged in becomes at length habitual[,] and increased in a very high degree is absolute Insanity.”

Where does exuberance end and mania begin? What is eccentricity, or simply a normal variation in temperament, and when does it tip over into irrational exuberance and psychopathology? We do not know. The edges of mania may be exhilarating, as Clifford Beers relates in
A Mind That Found Itself
—“
It seemed as though the refreshing breath of some kind Goddess of Wisdom was being blown gently against the surface of my brain.… So delicate, so crisp and exhilarating was it that words fail me in my attempt to
describe it”—but mania itself, as Beers knew from his long months in the asylum, is a dangerous place. A slightly fevered and manic brain may be adaptive: James Watson, for example, when asked about why the genes for manic-depressive illness survive in the gene pool, responded, “
Survival might often depend on not if we think two and two is four, but on being slightly wild. Because life is just much more complicated than when we try to organize it. And so a brain which is slightly disconnected from reality might be a good thing. I think when we do science we see that a little madness does help, and you propose bizarre things which everyone says can’t be true. Conceivably what you need is sometimes just to start up with a different set of facts.” But too much fever destroys the brain.

Normal exuberance can escalate into pathological enthusiasm, anger, or even mania. Those who have what Emil Kraepelin called a “manic predisposition” are not only extraverted, cheerful, and overly optimistic, they also possess highly unstable and irritable moods. Indeed, those most inclined to exuberance are often most subject to despair and hopelessness. These dark sides of exuberance both help and hinder: if enthusiasm switches quickly to wrath or is bound too often to impetuous action, many of the dangers we have discussed are made more likely. If melancholy gives a humanizing perspective to exuberance, however, there is less risk of hazardous behavior and shallow thought. As we shall see, a close familiarity with both exuberance and despair may lead to a profound understanding of human nature, as well as an ability to
more complexly express it in the arts and sciences.

Moderation in strong emotions is not always easily come by. Lucretius observed two thousand years ago that the destructive motions “
can never permanently get the upper hand and entomb vitality for evermore. Neither can the generative and augmentative motions permanently safeguard what they have created. So the war
of the elements that has raged throughout eternity continues on equal terms.” More often than not, the war is a struggle within as much as without: opposing natures reside within the same person; positive forces of mood and energy alternate or coexist with threatening or nihilistic ones. Exuberance does not stand alone; it exists in a landscape of other emotions and circumstance.

For some, intense and opposing emotions are an integral part of their temperament or mood disorder. Cyclothymia, for example, is a form of manic-depressive illness that consists of short cycles of depression and mild mania interspersed with periods of normal mood and behavior. Usually exuberant individuals may be subject to days or weeks of low energy and dejection. These cyclothymics, wrote the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, “
have a soft temperament which can swing to great extremes. The path over which it swings is a wide one, namely between cheerfulness and unhappiness.… Not only is the hypomanic disposition well known to be a particularly labile one, which also has leanings in the depressive direction, but many of these cheerful natures have when we get to know them better a permanent melancholic element in the background of their being.” The elements remain in flux: “The hypomanic and melancholic halves of the cycloid temperament relieve one another,” continued Kretschmer, and “form layers or patterns in individual cases, arranged in the most varied combinations.”

Moods are mutable. They swing into and out of one another, for joy and grief inhabit close and traversable lands. New Orleans funeral marches begin with dirgeful music during the procession to the cemetery but, on the return journey, exuberance bounds back. As the music critic Ben Ratliff describes it, “
the drummer takes the muffling handkerchief off the snare drum and lays down some opening rolls, and the songs turn up-tempo and cheerful, with a wildly multileveled polyphonic chatter that we all know is closer to the usual experience of life.” Any song, says Jelly Roll Morton, can be played as “blues” or “joys.”

It is not always easy to believe that the same individual might, as Byron put it, have under the same skin “
two or three within.” Those apparently exuberant are less often recognized as having a darker side, and those cast as doomed or depressive may never be seen for the liveliness they actually possess. Virginia Woolf is remembered more for her madness and suicide than for her vitality, despite the testament of her friends to her animation and dazzling laughter. Christopher Isherwood recalled that “
listening to [Woolf] we missed appointments, forgot love-affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours,” and Nigel Nicolson spoke of her vivacity: “
One would hand her a bit of information as dull as a lump of lead,” he said. “She would hand it back glittering like diamonds. I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two glasses of an excellent champagne. She was a life-enhancer.” Elizabeth Bowen, while recognizing Woolf’s ultimate fate, put her suicidal depression in the context of the rest of her life:

Yet it remains difficult to keep in mind the duality of moods. The prevailing mood tends to dominate the emotional landscape, both for the person and for those in its sphere of influence. James Barrie’s private secretary, Cynthia Asquith, described the effect of his inconstant moods on those around him: “
No pen could convey how widely Barrie varies. One day he looks so weary, sallow, lacklustre, that had I to ‘do’ him in our analogy game I’d compare him to a full ash-tray and an empty ink bottle; the next day he may look positively tingling with health—alert, aglow … of course, such a strong—such an overwhelmingly strong—personality has the most terrific effect on others. When he’s grey ashes, he’s devastatingly depressing. It’s almost impossible to fight against the influence. On the other hand, on his good days, he’s so alive, so full of charm—more than charm—a kind of benign wizardry, that it makes one feel well and happy.”

It was Barrie’s fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson, however, who wrote most brilliantly on the duality of moods and human nature, articulated so clearly the beholdenness of light moods to darker elements, and made explicit that gaiety carries a price. Stevenson was drawn to the darker sides of human character—evil and despair and malignant hypocrisy—but he was as aware of the joy of adventure, the delights of friendship, and the saving, high pleasures of life.

Stevenson was, by all accounts, a vivacious, immensely charming, and mercurial man. Edmund Gosse said that “gaiety” was his cardinal quality. “
A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him,” Gosse wrote. “He seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply
bubbling.” Another friend, Sidney Colvin, said that the “
most robust and ordinary men seemed to turn dim and null in presence of the vitality that glowed in the steadfast, penetrating fire of the lean man’s eyes, the rich, compelling charm of his smile … and lively expressiveness of his gestures.” Within an hour of first meeting, he said, Stevenson “had captivated the whole household.… He sped those summer nights and days for us all as I have scarce known any sped before or since.” Stevenson’s stepchildren agreed. Belle Osbourne wrote of him that he “
brought into our lives a sort of joyousness hard to describe,” and Lloyd, her brother, observed that he was “
so gay and buoyant that he kept every one in fits of laughter.” The poet Andrew Lang remarked that Stevenson so “
excited a passionate admiration and affection” in people that they “warmed their hands at that centre of light and heat.”

Stevenson, said Henry James, had “substance and spirit”; he was someone whom “
life carries swiftly before it and who signal and communicate, not to say gesticulate, as they go. He lived to the topmost pulse.” When Stevenson died, James wrote: “
He [had] lighted up a whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination … he had the
best
of it—the thick of the fray, the loudest of the music.” James Barrie, stricken by Stevenson’s death, felt his absence acutely: “
When I came to London,” he said, “there was a blank spot in it; Stevenson had gone. It could not be filled till he came back, and he never came back. I saw it again in Edinburgh the other day. It is not necessarily that he was the greatest, I don’t think he was the greatest, but of the men we might have seen he is the one we would like best to come back.”

But Stevenson was also described by those who knew him as excitable, high-strung, and inclined to restlessness, moodiness, and fits of rage. He was quick to the boil and wept easily. “
It was not in Louis to remain long in any mood,” said Edmund Gosse; “
he was as restless and questing as a Spaniel.” Andrew Lang, too, noticed
Stevenson’s erratic nature. There was, he said, “
a sort of uncommon celerity in changing expression, in thought and speech.” His legendary restlessness was summed up most graphically by Henry Adams, who said that Stevenson “
seems never to rest, but perches like a parrot on every available projection, jumping from one to another, and talking incessantly.” Keeping to his bird analogy, but switching species, Adams wrote to another friend that Stevenson looked like “
an insane stork, very warm and very restless.” An acquaintance of Stevenson’s in Samoa concurred: “
He was as active and restless as if his veins had been filled with quicksilver.”

W. E. Henley wrote of Stevenson that he was as “
mutable as the sea, / The brown eyes radiant with vivacity … /A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace / Of passion, impudence, and energy.” Another friend said that “
there were two Stevensons … this strange dual personality … I have seen him in all moods … chatting away in the calmest manner possible; and I have seen him become suddenly agitated, jump from that table and stalk to and fro across the floor like some wild forest animal … his face would glow and his eyes would flash, darkening, lighting, scintillating, hypnotising you with their brilliance and the burning fires within.” Stevenson had, in short, a febrile temperament.