Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  showed immediately that he was at home on the water. Instead of sitting sedately in the stern sheets as might have been expected, he swarmed over the barge from stem to stern during the passage to the Navy Yard. With exclamations of delight and informed appreciation he went over every inch of the boat from coxswain’s box to engine room. When she hit the wake of a passing craft and he was doused with spray, he just ducked and laughed and pointed out to his companions how well she rode a wave. Within a few minutes he’d won the hearts of every man of us on board, just as in the years to come he won the hearts of the crew of every ship he set foot on.… He demonstrated … the invaluable quality of contagious enthusiasm.

  There was an irrepressible vitality to the British leader as well. Indeed, Churchill’s energy wore out even Roosevelt: “I’m nearly dead,” Roosevelt said to a member of his cabinet after a few days in the company of Churchill. “I have to talk to the P.M. all night, and he gets bright ideas in the middle of the night and comes pattering down the hall to my bedroom in his bare feet.” A friend of Churchill’s said of him that “he seemed to have been endowed by fortune with a double charge of life and a double dose of human nature.” (Churchill himself remarked, “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm.”) He had, according to his friend Brendan Bracken, “tearing spirits—that is, when Winston wasn’t in the dumps—a kind of daring, a dislike of a drab existence, a tremendous zest in life.”

  C. P. Snow, like many others who observed Churchill, believed that his sheer will and optimism led the nation through its grimmest times. Somehow he managed to transfuse hope from his own vast storehouse of hopefulness and energy. His voice, said Snow, “was our hope. It was the voice of will and strength incarnate. It was saying what we wanted to hear said (‘We shall never surrender’) and what we tried to believe, sometimes against the protests of realism and common sense, would come true.” Churchill convinced himself, and then others, through the force of his emotions as well as ideas: “Churchill had a very powerful mind, but a romantic and unquantitative one,” observed Snow. “If he thought about a course of action long enough, if he conceived it alone in his own inner consciousness and desired it passionately, he convinced himself it must be possible. Then, with incomparable invention, eloquence and high spirits, he set out to convince everyone else that it was not only possible, but the only course of action open to man.” As Churchill himself said of T. E. Lawrence, “The multitudes were swept forward till their pace was the same as his.”

  Lord Franks, who after the war became ambassador to the United States, spoke of Churchill’s ability to give hope to those around him: “I remember early in the war attending a meeting on the roof of the Ministry of Supply when Winston addressed us. I came away more happy about things. He dispelled our misgivings and set at rest our fears; he spoke of his aim and of his purpose, so that we knew that somehow it would be achieved. He gave us faith. There was in him a demonic element, as in Calvin and Luther. He was a spiritual force.”

  Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician, believed that it was passion rather than reason that accounted for much of Churchill’s success in leading the nation against Hitler: “He was indeed made for the hour. In the extraordinary circumstances of 1940, with the hopeless inequality of Germany and Britain—or so it seemed—we needed a very unreasonable man at the top. If Winston had been a reasonable man he would not have taken the line he did; if he had been a man of sound judgment he might have considered it his duty to act differently. A sage would have been out of his element in 1940; instead we got another Joan of Arc.”

  After the war was over, Churchill spoke about inspiration: “I was very glad that Mr. Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was the nation and the race dwelling all around the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” It was the roar of life.

  Exuberance is important not only in leadership, that is, in creating a potent link between leaders and groups, it is also indispensable in creating other kinds of social bonds. These bonds are complex, and ancient, and they are forged in many ways. Exuberant dance and music, for example, are universal in human culture, but not unique to it; other animals take their high spirits and energy into rhythmic gamboling as well. Jane Goodall, in a letter from Africa to her family, describes a “rain festival” among chimpanzees, a dramatic response of the troop to nature:

  Suddenly Bare Bum left his troop and galloped, full speed, at the other line, swinging his body from side to side, arms flailing in a scything motion. There was an outburst of panting calls. He moved on up a hill & as he reached the top, stood up and swiped at a bush with his hand. Well, I thought that was that. But no. They all began to climb trees. Pale Face then turned & began to charge diagonally down the hill. As he went he snatched at the branch of a tree, tore it off, waved it above him, & charged on, dragging it with him. Then he dropped it & climbed a tree. But another large male was on the move, charging down, breaking off his branch. Then two hurtled down, one after the other, leapt into a tree, seized branches, & leapt to the ground—30 ft. at least, taking their branches with them, charging on, reaching a tree, seizing it, swinging round & leaping up into the branches. I think only the males took part in this “Rain Festival.” The others staying in their “seats,” watching.

  I don’t think I have ever watched any performance which gave me such a thrill. Mostly the actors were silent, but every so often their wild calls rang out above the thunder. Primitive hairy men, huge and black on the skyline, flinging themselves across the ground in their primaeval display of strength and power. And as each demonstrated his own majestic superiority, the women and children watched in silence, and the rain poured down while the lightning flashed brilliantly across the grey sky.

  The “Festival” lasted for thirty minutes, played out in a hillside curve surrounded by trees; it was, Goodall said, a “natural out of door theatre.” One can easily imagine in this chimpanzee display the trace beginnings of human dance and music and see in it the dramatic response of a single animal to nature, with cascading effects throughout its social group.

  Dance and music are an ancient part of our hominid culture. Over fifty thousand years ago, Neanderthals made flutes from the bones of bears; long before that, mothers sang to their infants and, through that song, parent and child were brought closer together still. Music, the gods knew, transforms. Orpheus sang and turned the course of the rivers; trees stirred from their rootings. Sisyphus took leave of his labors to sit still on his rock and listen to Orpheus; the vulture, under his spell, desisted from ripping at Prometheus’s liver. And Jupiter, in awe, took Orpheus’s lyre and placed it among the stars.

  Music and dance are deeply embedded in the social character of our species. They ignite, infect, and express our collective, complex emotions: music and dance arouse group energies for the hunt, or planting; celebrate the seasons of the gods; and mark, thereby abetting—through communal festivals of passage into adulthood, marriage, and death—the recognition of change within a group. To music we raise our armies and lower our dead.

  Music acts quickly on the brain, and fast, simultaneous chemical changes in individual brains within a group make more likely a quick, cohesive response to circumstance. Music and dance, it has been said, paralyze the ability to think logically; it is exactly in this instinctive, rather than more lengthy and fraught cerebral response that impassioned action is taken. “To fling my arms wide / In the face of the sun,” wrote Langston Hughes, “Dance! Whirl! Whirl! / Till the quick day is done.” The wide-open whirl of dance is a head-thrown-back joy, one that leaps away from life-weariness into a different world. Dance energizes and unites; it quickens, it exhilarates, it liberates.

  Exuberant music does
likewise. A rapid tempo in major key stirs and loosens. Fear fades a bit. Whether it is a Sousa march or a tarantella, an African drumbeat, a Gilbert and Sullivan tune, a gospel hymn, or a great chorus from Handel, exuberant music lifts up, invigorates, and, for a while at least, brings together those who are listening. Music has an infectious, and on occasion, transformative effect. The trombonist Jack Teagarden described the first time he heard the great Louis Armstrong play: “The [river] boat was still far off. But in the bow I could see a Negro standing in the wind, holding a trumpet high and sending out the most brilliant notes I had ever heard. It was jazz … it was Louis Armstrong descending from the sky like a god. The ship hugged the bank as if it were driven there by the powerful trumpet beats.”

  The effects of jazz were dazzling and disturbing to its creators as well. “It was a breakdown,” observed Hoagy Carmichael, “an insane dancing madness brought on by music—new, disjointed, unorganized music, full of screaming blue notes and a solid beat. We pioneers of it all broke down.… Jazz maniacs were being born and I was one of them.”

  For Louis Armstrong, exuberant music was an extension of his natural being. His biographer Laurence Bergreen is convinced that Armstrong’s exuberant temperament was an essential element in his genius. He had a “distinctly American brand of optimism and striving,” Bergreen writes, but “there was power and even an edge of anger to the laughter. It was a cosmic shout of defiance, a refusal to accept the status quo, and a determination to remake the world of his childhood and by extension, the world at large, as he believed it ought to be.” In the end, he says, “it was Louis’s animating spirit of joy, as much as his music, that was responsible for his transforming vision.” Exuberance lifts mind and soul into freer space: exuberance creates music and is in turn created by it.

  Wynton Marsalis, in an interview with Dick Russell for Russell’s book Black Genius and the American Experience, states that part of Armstrong’s genius was that “his sound is both the most modern and the most ancient, like somebody playing outside the walls of Jericho.… He brought back a real joy to music. Armstrong loosens up everybody’s phrasing, their concept of where to place the beat.” Always, Marsalis says, there is a complexity to the emotional experience underlying Armstrong’s joy and music: “The question in jazz is how do you make conflicting things harmonious. And achieving that balance is what Pops is basically all about. He could play with tremendous power and grace. In equal measure. He stayed calm within himself and had this great sense of tranquility in his personality. But there was also this barely contained frenzy in his playing, like rice ready to boil over.” Armstrong himself said, “They all know I’m there in the cause of happiness.”

  Music evolved as a “play-space” for the mind, according to Ian Cross of the University of Cambridge. Ambiguities and complex rhythmic patterns create a mental and emotional climate in which conceptual leaps can be taken with no risk to survival. The brain under the influence of music can, as it does in wit and during times of play, experiment and bound about within the confines of a safe environment. It can galumph. Music, like play and laughter, increases emotional arousal and disinhibits; it rewards the participant for passionate engagement in the here and now. Music gives back pleasure in exchange for emotional discovery and involvement. Louis Armstrong, writes Bergreen, “was game for anything. He’d play the slide whistle or any damn fool instrument just to see what kind of a sound he could get from it, and what effect it would have on the music and the crowd. For Louis, that spirit of endless playfulness was the essence of performing.”

  Music is sometimes used to induce positive emotions in research subjects who take part in studies of problem-solving and imaginative thought; as we have seen, psychologists find that it generates a mental state in which flexibility, memory, and originality increase. Music also increases the likelihood that an individual will remember things important to living in a group. Chanting, drumbeats, and other rhythmic structures imposed upon speech are critical to passing down oral history and group traditions from one generation to the next. They also facilitate tribal remembering of significant information about seasons, plants, and animals; keep alive the rituals of religion; help to recall important details of battles; and even, perhaps, lock in place the memory of the location of natural resources. (We are not alone in the cultural and pragmatic use of rhythm. The acoustic biologist Roger Payne has shown, for instance, that the songs of humpback whales contain refrains that form rhymes. It is possible that these singing whales, like humans, use rhyme as a mnemonic device for complex material.)

  Surely man’s awed response to nature provoked the first—and then much of the finest—music of joy. Our exultant hymns and great Masses brim with exuberance and praise for the universe and its Creator. The ancient psalms, meant to be sung, exhorted man to make music as a tribute to God upon “an instrument of ten strings, and upon the lute: upon a loud instrument, and upon the harp.” The Lord “hath done wonderful things,” therefore “shew yourselves joyful unto the Lord, all ye lands: sing, rejoice, and give thanks. / Praise the Lord upon a harp.” Not just man but the entire earth should show its joy: “Let the sea make a noise.… / Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord.” The final psalm continues with the invocation of praise through music and dance: “Praise him in the sound of the trumpet,” it proclaims, “praise him upon the lute and harp. / Praise him in the cymbals and dances: praise him upon the strings and pipe.” All returns to the glory of God: “When I consider thy heavens,” sings the psalmist—“The work of thy fingers, the moon and the starres”—man’s stance must be one of awe, of celebration. It is easy to imagine, as the Bible records, that David not only sang his tributes to the Lord but danced with abandon before the Ark.

  The great joy-filled Christian hymns continue the songs of praise from the Old Testament. It would be difficult to find more exuberant anthems than those filling the Christian hymnal, although despair and anguish are also present in full measure. It is not just the triumphant hymns of Easter or the joyous carols of Christmas that ring with joy. Exuberance, it would seem, is the inherent response of those who are moved deeply by nature and who delight in assigning its glories to a Creator. It is, as well, the response of those who have no such belief but nonetheless exult in the beauty of the world they see around them.

  Music activates the same reward systems in the brain that are activated by play, laughter, sex, and drugs of abuse. Brain imaging studies show that pleasurable music creates patterns of change in the dopamine and opioid systems similar to those seen during drug-induced euphoric states. If experimental subjects are asked to listen to music and some are given Naloxone, a drug used to treat addicts by blocking opiate receptors in the brain, and others are given a placebo, those who receive Naloxone report a significant drop in the pleasure they experience while listening to music. Those who are given a placebo do not.

  Music not only activates the reward system, it decreases activity in brain structures associated with negative emotions. Music is an expansive pleasure, one that both reflects and generates joy. As the English psychiatrist Anthony Storr has written, “Music exalts life, enhances life, and gives it meaning.… Music is a source of reconciliation, exhilaration, and hope which never fails.” It is, he argues, “an irreplaceable, undeserved, transcendental blessing.”

  Exultant states are often a part of religious as well as musical experiences. William James, of course, wrote about this brilliantly. “Man’s extremity,” he believed, “is God’s opportunity,” and James brought a sympathetic temperament to the study of those for whom religion exists “not as a dull habit, but an acute fever.” There are individuals, he observed, for whom religion in its “highest flights” is an “infinitely passionate” thing. “It adds to life an enchantment… [that] is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command.” The capacity to experience ecs
tasy cannot be willed; it is a gift, an ability like a fine wit or a way with shapes and spaces.

  The ecstasy associated with religious experiences is transient, more often measured in minutes than in hours, but it shares with exuberance the sense of well-being, expansiveness, joy, upliftedness, and a conviction of significance. Such moments bring with them intense mental and bodily sensations and a feeling that one has entered a new world of meaning. Many things can trigger ecstasy. Marghanita Laski, in her study of secular and religious ecstasies, found that nature, art, sexual love, and religion were by far the most frequent triggers of ecstatic experiences, and she suggested that such ecstasies, in turn, give value to that which triggers them. They serve as points of departure for spiritual journeys, creative quests, or explorations of the mind.

  C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, describes his ecstasy in seeing for the first time an illustration in Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. The long winter, he said, “broke up in a single moment.… Spring is the inevitable image, but this was not gradual like Nature’s springs. It was as if the Arctic itself, all the deep layers of secular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly, into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water.” To have this experience once, Lewis says, sets one on a pursuit to recapture what has been and disappeared: “I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.” He felt as a result of knowing “Joy” that he knew nature differently; his knowledge was direct, not apprehended from a distance or learned of from a book. Ecstatic joy was for him an “imaginative Renaissance” that lured him toward his subsequent spiritual journeys. As the Australian banksia plant needs fire to release its seeds, so Lewis needed joy.