Exuberance: The Passion for Life (40 page)

Each failure, each onslaught, extracts a bit more of Beret’s sanity. Per Hansa, however, not only holds on to his high spirits but finds them sustained and generated anew by the cycles of nature: “
the power to create a new life over this Endless Wilderness, and transform it into a habitable land for human beings. Wasn’t it wonderful? … 
As the mild spring weather set in, a feverish restlessness seized him.…
He walked so lightly; everything that had life he touched with a gentle hand, but talk to it he must; his voice sounded low, yet it thrilled with a vibrant energy.… [Beret] felt a force that made her tremble, emanating from him.… Per Hansa became more restless, but it only seemed to fill him with greater joy.”

Raw optimism is a defining element not only in Per Hansa’s life, but in Rölvaag’s portrayal of pioneer life in general:

Himself an immigrant and a pioneer, Albert Einstein once said that America is more capable of enthusiasm than any other country. It is certainly the case that America seems particularly to value exuberance and optimism. Not surprisingly, perhaps—in a country that gave birth to Walt Whitman and John Philip Sousa; invented jazz, square dancing, and rock and roll; gave the world Chuck Yeager, Ted Turner, and P. T. Barnum; created
Oklahoma!;
and glories in Louis Armstrong and Theodore Roosevelt—
Americans see enthusiasm as an advantage. When asked which emotions they most like to experience, Americans are far more likely than people from other countries to say that they favor enthusiasm. They are also far more likely to say that they believe enthusiasm is a useful and constructive emotion in their lives. (
Optimism is a related and defining American trait. The results of a Pew Carter poll conducted in 2002 of 38,000 people in forty-four countries found that more Americans [65 percent] than respondents from any other country disagreed with the statement “Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control.”)

Interestingly,
high rates of manic-depressive illness have been observed in American immigrant groups, which suggests the possibility that individuals with mild forms of the illness, or temperamental variants of high energy and exuberant mood, may have
been selected for. Individuals who sought the new, who took risks that others would not, or who rebelled against repressive social systems may have been more likely to immigrate to America and, once there, to succeed.

Exuberance is a part of the national vision, as well as its character. Whitman proclaimed, “
My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,/I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents, / I am afoot with my vision,” and Lindbergh took this exultant notion to the skies. He weighed risk against adventure and chose freedom with a vengeance. “
I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground,” he wrote, “one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary lifetime.”

What happens, though, when the wine of the gods disappears, or if nothing matters enough to stake one’s life and dreams on? What happens when enthusiasts become jaded? A passion for life is essential to the renewal of life. If passion is lost, the future itself is diminished. Scott Fitzgerald made this point well. There are no second acts in American lives, he said, but
he made an ironic exception for New York in the boom days of the 1920s. The first act had been dazzling. “
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world”; it was an age of miracle and promise. But it was also, glaringly, an age of excess. The city and its inhabitants had become restless and careless: “
The buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper,” he wrote. The city was “
bloated, gutted, stupid with cake and circuses.”

By 1927, “
a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly
signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet.” (There was a brief burst of hope in the midst of the decay, but it proved ephemeral. “
Something bright and alien flashed across the sky,” Fitzgerald wrote. “A young Minnesotan who seemed to have had nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz Age continued; we would all have one more.”)

The Lost City’s second act, when it came, proved a tragedy. “
We were somewhere in North Africa,” Fitzgerald recalled, “when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.” The 1929 collapse of the stock market capped a decade of hollow euphoria and overextension, years that had drawn from the city far more than they ever gave back in hope or vitality. Exuberance, ginned up to such an unnatural level, was brittle and could not last. Fitzgerald’s contemporaries were jaded and doomed, he wrote, and “
had begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence.” A classmate killed his wife and himself, “another tumbled ‘accidentally’ from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York … still another had his skull crushed by a maniac’s axe in an insane asylum where he was confined.”

Fitzgerald’s own moods swung with the city’s. In his autobiographical essays,
The Crack-up
, which he wrote in the decade following the crash, he described the toll. “
I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, but I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” Like the desperate jubilation of the Jazz Age, his mind, as he had known it, could not last. He was paying the piper for “
an over-extension of the flank, a burning of the candle at both ends; a call upon physical resources that I did not command, like a man over-drawing at his bank. In its impact this blow was more
violent [than his earlier psychological crises] but it was the same in kind—a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down.” Before that time, his happiness, he said, had “
often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books—and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural—unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.”

Exuberance is an assailable thing, as is the hope that rides with it. Exultant mood often forewarns a harrowing fall. Champagne will go flat, passion burn itself out, and optimism be trimmed by experience. The ecstasy that beguiles, even as it ascends into madness, will plunge, shattering its bearer. “
It’s not much fun writing about these breakdowns after they themselves have broken,” observed Robert Lowell in the aftermath of a manic attack. “One stands stickily splattered with patches of the momentary bubble.” He took the image and emotion into verse:

Savingly, nature teaches that joy can be replenished, life can succeed death, and joy find its way out of sorrow. Nature gives of its exuberance in remarkable ways, at extraordinary times. In 1918 a scientist described the flowers emerging from the Somme battlefield, a place where death had so recently been all-dominant: “
In all the woods where the fighting was most severe not a tree is left alive, and the trunks which still stand are riddled with shrapnel and bullets and torn by fragments of shell, while here and there unexploded shells may still be seen embedded in the stems. Aveluy Wood, however, affords [an] example of the effort being made by Nature to beautify the general scene of desolation. Here some of the trees are still alive, though badly broken, but the ground beneath is covered with a dense growth of the rose-bay willow herb
(Epilobium augustifolium)
extending over several acres. Seen from across the valley, this great sheet of rosy-pink was a most striking object, and the shattered and broken trees rising out of it looked less forlorn than elsewhere.”

Peter Ackroyd writes of a similar beauty and life force in the wake of the German bombings of London during World War II.
“
It was the invisible and intangible spirit or presence of London that survived and somehow flourished,” he says.

For some who lose hope and vitality, nature will act on its own, as it did in London and the Somme, to reinfuse life. However dreadful the circumstances—death or madness, war, betrayal—the passion for life will surge back. For these individuals, it is an innate and irrepressible force; they are, in every true sense, exuberant by nature. For others, joy and laughter seep back in more slowly. They are less resilient; their healing is more hesitant and perhaps less
complete. By whatever means joy comes back—however naturally or however haltingly—it is an amazing thing that it does. It is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.

The love for life returns in a profusion of ways. Biologist Joyce Poole, for example, writes that only Africa’s natural beauty could heal the terrible pain she knew following the slaughter of the elephants she had studied and loved. Great matriarchs had been butchered by ivory poachers and entire family groups destroyed. By the time Poole left Amboseli, she writes, “
I could no longer take any pleasure from the sights and smells and feelings that had once been so evocative.” She watched on television as Kenya burned tons of ivory: “As the flames consumed the remains of so many elephants’ lives, I cried for the thousands of violent deaths those elephants had suffered and for the hundreds of orphans still running bewildered through the Tsavo bush.… My dreams went up in smoke with the ivory, and I was left shattered and brittle like so many sharp-edged pieces of the burnt-to-blue ivory.… [T]he remaining magic had gone, and my bush life filled me with a terrible emptiness.”

Only Africa itself could restore life. Poole recounts an early-morning flight she took with Richard Leakey long after she had watched the ivory burn: