The Social Animal (56 page)

Harold felt rejuvenated by his memories. In 1979 the psychologist Ellen Langer conducted an experiment in which she equipped an old monastery in Peterborough, New Hampshire, with props from the 1950s. She invited men in their seventies and eighties to stay for a week. They watched old Ed Sullivan shows, listened to Nat King Cole on the radio, and talked about the 1959 championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. At the end of the week, the men had gained an average of three pounds and looked younger. They tested better on hearing and memory. Their joints were more flexible and 63 percent did better on an intelligence test. Experiments like that are more suggestive than scientific, but Harold felt better when he was living back in the past. The pains diminished. The joys increased.

Harold spent a lot of time thinking about his teenage years, when he was about sixteen. This is the period researchers call the “reminiscence bump,” because memories from late adolescence to early adulthood tend to be more vivid than those from any other time of life. He wondered how accurate his memories could possibly be.

When George Vaillant from the Grant Longitudinal Study sent an elderly subject reports on his early life for fact-checking purposes, he sent back the reports insisting, “You must have sent these to the wrong person.” He simply could not remember any of the events from his own life that had been recorded at the time. The subject of another longitudinal study had suffered a brutal childhood at the hands of abusive parents, well documented at the time. But at age seventy, he remembered his father as a “good family man” and his mother as “the kindest woman in the world.”

Harold also experienced a sort of negative enjoyment. After a lifetime spent preparing for things and building for things, he was finally free from the burden of the future. “How pleasant is the day,” William James once observed, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Even though old and dying, Harold was plagued by an intellectual discontent. Without even thinking about it, he, like most of us, regarded life not only as a set of events to be experienced, but as a question to be answered. What is it all for? Sitting there on that porch with his canes propped against the chair, Harold set out, in the twilight of his life, to understand the meaning of his existence, to bring it all to a point.

In his famous book
Man’s Search for Meaning
, Viktor Frankl writes, “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life.” He quotes Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a
why
to live for can bear with almost any
how.”
But then Frankl made a crucial, helpful point: It’s fruitless to try to think in the abstract about what life in general means. The meaning of one’s life is only discernible within the specific circumstances of one’s own specific life. In the concentration camp, he writes, “We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that
it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us
. We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.”

Harold thought back on his life as a son, a husband, a business consultant, and a historian and wondered what question life had asked of him. He looked for something that could be defined as his life’s calling or mission. He thought the project would be easy, but the more he looked for a key to his life, the harder it was to find. When studied honestly and accurately, his life had been a series of fragmented events. Sometimes he had been very money oriented, but other times he was oblivious to money. Sometimes he had been ambitious, but in other phases he was not. During some years he wore the mask of a scholar, while at others he wore the mask of a businessman, and who was the true self beneath the masks? In
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
, Erving Goffman argues that it’s masks all the way down.

Scientists and writers have tried to impose certain schema to describe how life evolves. Abraham Maslow defined his hierarchy of needs—from the physical to safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. But much recent research has cast doubt on the idea that human lives fall into such neat schemas—there are no simple progressions of the sort Maslow described. Some days Harold felt defeated, and concluded that life is unknowable. Take something as simple as buying a car. Did he choose his last car because of the shape of the body, the write-up in
Consumer Reports
, some vague image he had of the brand personality, how it felt in the test drive, some sense of the status it would give him, or maybe because of the dealer discount? All of those things must have played a role, but he couldn’t really define the proportions. There was a murky twilight zone between the factors that must have gone into his choice, and the actual choice as it had emerged at the dealership.

“We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action,” Immanuel Kant had written. And if that is true of buying a car, how much more true must it be about pursuing the grand goals of a life. If Harold had a true understanding of himself, he would be able to predict what he would want from life in a year, but he had no confidence he could do that, or even in a month. If Harold had a true understanding of himself, he would be able to describe certain qualities he possessed, but he had no confidence he could do that reliably either. People vastly overrate and misapprehend their abilities. Numerous studies have shown that there is low correlation between how people rate their own personality and how people around them rate it.

Harold would sit there trying to think about himself, but in seconds he found he was thinking about people he had known or things he had experienced. Sometimes he’d think about some project he’d done at work, or a fight he had had with a coworker. He had a sense of himself as a coherent presence in these dramas. But when he tried to think of himself in isolation—what he was and what he lived for—he could conjure up no clear concept in his mind. It was as if he were an optical illusion, visible when you weren’t looking straight at it, but invisible when you made it the object of your attention.

Some of his friends had off-the-shelf narratives to tell about themselves. One was a poor boy who had risen from rags to riches. Another was a sinner who had been saved in an instant by God. Another had changed his mind about everything in the course of his life—he had started in the forest of error and emerged into the light of truth.

In his book
The Redemptive Self
, Dan McAdams writes that Americans are especially prone to organize their lives into stories of redemption. Once upon a time, they had strayed on the path of tribulation, but then they met a mentor or found a wife, or went to work at a foundation, or did some other thing, and they were redeemed. They were delivered from error and put onto a proper path. Their life had purpose from that moment forth.

As he reviewed his own life, Harold couldn’t see how his life fit into any of those narrative molds. And as this process of self-analysis went on, Harold grew intensely sad—plagued by the sense that there was an ultimate deadline he would not meet. Some psychologists urge patients to sit in a chair and look inside themselves. But there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that this sort of rumination is often harmful. When people are depressed, they pick out the negative events and emotions of their lives, and, by fixing attention upon them, they make those neural networks stronger and more dominant. In his book
Strangers to Ourselves
, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia summarizes several experiments in which rumination made depressed people more depressed while distraction made them less depressed. Ruminators fell into self-defeating, negative patterns of thought, did worse in problem-solving tasks, and had much gloomier predictions about their own future.

At times, the whole self-examination exercise seemed futile to Harold. “How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room,” Franz Kafka once observed. “There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.”

One afternoon in late summer, Harold was out on the porch of the Aspen house, watching the river go by. He could hear Erica in her office upstairs, tapping away at her keyboard. He had a scratched metal box on his lap, and he was leafing through some papers and photographs.

He came across a picture of himself from long ago. He was about six when the photo was taken. He was wearing a navy-style peacoat, and he was atop a metal playground slide, about to come down, looking with intense concentration on the chute below.

“What do I have in common with that boy?” Harold asked himself. Nothing, except that it was himself. The knowledge, the circumstances, the experience, and the appearance were all different, but there was something alive in that boy that was still alive within him now. There was a certain essence that had changed as he had aged, but without fundamentally becoming something other than itself, and that essence Harold chose to call his soul.

He supposed that this essence was manifested in neurons and synapses. He had been born with certain connections, and since the brain is the record of the feelings of a life, he had slowly accreted new neural connections in his head. And yet Harold couldn’t help but think how enchanted it all was. The connections had been formed by emotion. The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there.

Harold looked at the little boy’s hands clutching the railing of the slide and at the expression on the little boy’s face. Harold didn’t have to imagine what the boy’s affections and fears were, because at some level he could still experience them directly. He didn’t have to reconstruct the manner in which that boy saw the world because it was still, at some level, his own manner. That little boy was afraid of heights. That little boy felt light-headed at the sight of blood. That little boy was in love but often felt alone. That little boy already possessed a hidden kingdom, a cast of characters and responses that would grow, mature, assert themselves, recede, and regress at different times of his life. That hidden kingdom was he, then as now.

Part of that kingdom grew out of his relationships with his parents. They weren’t the most profound people ever. They spent too much time in the world of commerce, focusing on appearances and vanities. They could never really answer his deepest needs, but they had been good people, who loved him. One of them had probably taken him to this playground, and stood behind the camera to take this picture, and had filed it away somewhere so Harold could see it now. There’d been an emotion when the picture was taken and an emotion when it was filed away, and there was an emotion when Harold looked at it now and imagined his mom or dad behind the camera pushing the button. The loops still reverberated across the decades, from generation to generation.

The soul emerged from these loops of affection. The loops were momentary and fragile, also permanent and enduring. Even today, there were little sleeper cells lodged in his mind—affections and fears planted long ago which could lie dormant for decades and then suddenly spring to life in the right circumstances. The way his parents reacted to his small accomplishments—that delicious feeling motivated him his whole life. The way his working-class grandparents never felt truly accepted in middle-class America, as if their presence was contingent and peripheral—that insecurity lingered in him his whole life. The way his friends in school draped their arms around his shoulder and leaned against him in the cafeteria—that feeling of comradeship that strengthened him until his dying day. Social connections early in life predict longevity and good health at the end.

Harold tried and failed to see into the tangle of connections, the unconscious region, which he came to think of as the Big Shaggy. The only proper attitude toward this region was wonder, gratitude, awe, and humility. Some people think they are the dictators of their own life. Some believe the self is an inert wooden ship to be steered by a captain at the helm. But Harold had come to see that his conscious self—the voice in his head—was more a servant than a master. It emerged from the hidden kingdom and existed to nourish, edit, restrain, attend, refine, and deepen the soul within.

For all his life until this period, he had wondered how his life would turn out. But now the story was complete. He knew his fate. He was relieved from the burden of the future. The cold fear of death was there in his mind, but so was the knowledge that he’d been extraordinarily lucky.

He stepped back and asked some questions of himself, assessments of the life he had lived. And each question generated its own instant feeling, so he didn’t even have to put the answer into words. Had he deepened himself? In a culture of instant communication, in which it was so easy to live superficially, had he spent time on the important things, developing his most consequential talents? This question felt good to ask, because while he had never become a prophet or sage, he had read the serious books, engaged the serious questions, and had tried, as best he could, to cultivate a luxuriant inner realm.

Had he contributed to the river of knowledge, left a legacy for future generations? This question he could not feel so good about. He had tried to discover new things. He had written essays and delivered lectures. But he had been an observer more than an actor. For too many years he had drifted, flitting from one interest to another. At other times, he had held back, unwilling to take the risks and suffer the blows that come from living in the arena. He had not done all that he might have to offer gifts to those who would live on.