SubscribeIn August of 1973 I was flying back from Chicago, where I had screened Westworld. It appeared the picture would be successful. The producer and I had survived an impossible budget and an impossible schedule: to shoot and release a picture in six months. Many people had predicted we couldn't do it; some had even bet their jobs we couldn't. Heads would soon roll at the studio--but not ours! Now, with the intense pressure abruptly ended, the producer and I shared in a mood of almost hysterical self-congratulation. We had done it: not only had we made our dates, but the little low-budget picture actually seemed to work! Sitting on that airplane, we literally felt on top of the world.
Suddenly I broke out in a drenching sweat. My clothes were soaked through within seconds. I was panic-stricken, in the grip of a powerful anxiety attack. But why at this instant of airborne elation? It took a while to figure it out.
All my life I had pursued clear goals: in high school, to get into a good college; in college, to get into medical school; in medical school, to become a writer; as a writer, to make a movie.
I was thirty years old. I had graduated from Harvard, taught at Cambridge University, climbed the Great Pyramid, earned a medical degree, married and divorced, been a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, published two bestselling novels, and now had made a movie. And I had abruptly run out of goals for myself.
I was stranded within my own life. That was why I broke into a sweat: what was I going to do now?
I had no idea.
In the following weeks, I fell into a lethargy, then a full-blown depression. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Needless to say, sympathy for my condition was in short supply. To be depressed by success was not attractive, or even understandable. My friends didn't realize that they might be next in line.
I took to haunting bookstores, buying five hundred dollars' worth of books at a time, carrying them off in cartons. Books on every conceivable subject: dinosaurs, hot-air ballooning, Charles II, saturation diving, Islamic art, weather forecasting, computer graphics, Indonesian cooking, criminology, Benjamin Franklin, the Himalaya, Victorian cities, high-energy physics, tigers, Leonardo da Vinci, the British Raj, witchcraft, vegetarian cooking, the Inca Empire, Winslow Homer. Since nothing interested me, everything was equally uninteresting.
One day I came across a book called Be Here Now. It was an esoteric, quasi-religious Eastern-philosophy book of the sort I didn't usually look at, but it had a handmade quality and an odd shape that caught my eye. The author was Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, an expelled professor of psychology at Harvard. I had been a reporter on the Harvard Crimson during the sixties when Alpert and his colleague Timothy Leary were thrown off the faculty for giving LSD to undergraduates. I remembered those incidents well. Now here was his book.
I took it home and read it. The book was in three sections. The first section contained straightforward prose, the second section consisted of hand-printed words and pictures, a kind of messy collage; the third section was a guide to meditation.
I read the first section. I expected to find the disorganized ramblings of a poor fellow whose brains had been scrambled by too much acid and too many mystical journeys that went nowhere. But instead I found a lucid history of a driven, successful East Coast intellectual who suddenly found his life, his houses, his cars, his lovers, his vacations, his work, to be unsatisfying.
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I felt exactly the same way.
Richard Alpert, a Harvard renegade, an obviously unbalanced man who had gone off the deep end of his life, now appeared before me as somebody I identified with strongly. I had a juggling act to do, to make it all right for me to agree with him. Richard Alpert must have something on the ball after all.
But there was a further implication. Alpert, now Ram Dass--the new name stuck in my throat--I didn't even want to say it--Ram Dass had gone to India. And after several years he had come back with answers that seemed to work for him. He seemed to feel better about things, to have found a new perspective.
He had made a pilgrimage to India.
Should I?
I couldn't stand the idea. The implications of it. I couldn't see myself as a holy seeker after truth. Wearing white robes, contemplating my navel. I still shopped at Brooks Brothers. I still liked Brooks Brothers.
There had to be another way.
My attitude toward mystical journeys was typified by the joke about the student who seeks the holy man in India, finds him meditating at the top of a mountain, and asks breathlessly, "What is the meaning of life?"
The holy man says, "Life is a flower."
The student is outraged: "Life is a flower?"
To which the holy man replies, "You mean it's not?"
That was my idea: nobody knew any more than I did. Not really. A professor might know more about his particular subject, and the resident of a city might know more about that city, but as far as reality was concerned, nobody knew any more than I did. I figured I knew all there was to know.
What I knew was that the history of man demonstrated the inexorable triumph of reason over superstition, culminating in our acceptance of science as the best method for learning the truth and exploring the universe. That in the past men had believed all sorts of nonsense, but through the fruits of science we were able to roll back the darkness and live in the light of reason.
This meant that, however bad life might be now, it could only have been worse in the past ages. The history I envisioned was a history of steady progress. Nothing was lost, only gained. In no way were the people of, say, the Middle Ages better off than I was. That was inconceivable. Medieval people were suffocated by their social structure, impoverished by their economy, and driven by their religion to make those idiotic (if beautiful) cathedrals.
I lived in a fast-paced scientific world, where technical journals were removed from the library after five years. In general, I preferred to look forward. We lived in an exciting time, in which we were learning the nature of reality at the subatomic level, the nature of th universe, and the nature of life. I was living in the most enlightened, the richest, the most advanced, the most liberated period in the history of man.
And I knew that, despite my fame, fortune, and psychiatry bills, I was miserable.
And it seemed Ram Dass was not.
I have now reigned about fifty years in victory and peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to be wanting for my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen. O man, place not thy confidence in this present world!Darrin McMahon's Happiness: A History suggests that our focus on happiness is a relatively recent development. From the Economist's review:
His central argument is that the modern idea of happiness was an invention of the Enlightenment. The idea of heavenly felicity came down to earth, says Mr McMahon, during the 17th and 18th centuries. “Happiness, in the Enlightenment view”, he explains, “was less an ideal of godlike perfection than a self-evident truth, to be pursued and obtained in the here and now.” In 1776 America's Founding Fathers declared “the pursuit of happiness” to be one of man's “unalienable rights”, along with life and liberty.And:
Historically speaking, this was a radical change. For the ancient Greeks, happiness was largely bound up with notions of luck and fortune. Any man, however high and mighty, could be brought down by a twist of fate. The important thing, therefore, was not to seek happiness for its own sake but to live virtuously. Being good, as Mr McMahon nicely puts it, was more important than feeling good. For Herodotus and his contemporaries, happiness was not a “subjective state” but a “characterisation of an entire life that can be reckoned only at death.”
“Those only are happy”, [John Stuart] Mill reckoned, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”Some concrete suggestions:
posted by kcm at 11:08 AM on August 28, 2006 [1 favorite]