Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Payne describes the psychological experience of exuberance as a progression from active intoxication to a more transcendent peacefulness. Initially, she says, she feels “[h]igh, energetic. Excited. Passionate. Uninhibited. Garrulous if with someone else, ecstatic if alone.” The exuberance progresses into “a state of serenity, during which I especially like to be alone—to lie in a hammock looking up into the leaves or stars, thinking and glorying and giving thanks for the wholeness and beauty of life.”

  Joyce Poole, the scientific director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, is a colleague of Katy Payne’s and, like her, an excellent writer. She has been a field biologist for nearly thirty years and has made key contributions to our understanding of elephants, including pioneering research on musth (behavior which is marked, in males, by high levels of testosterone and secretions from the temporal gland). She has also studied elephant feeding, reproductive, and social behavior; their vocal and olfactory communication patterns; the effects of poaching on the social structure of elephant families; and elephant genetics. An American who fell in love with Africa when her father was director of the Africa Peace Corps program, she was, she writes, an emotional child “quick to laughter, but also quick to anger and easily wounded and saddened. With my father’s spirit of adventure and sense of principle and my mother’s emotions, I frequently became deeply upset by the injustices of life.”

  While Poole was still a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, her research on musth was acknowledged by a major award from the American Society of Mammologists and published in Nature. She finished her dissertation in record time because, as she put it, “I went into an intensely manic state, working until 2:00 a.m. most mornings and returning to the office again at 6:00 a.m.” Poole took her formidable energy and scientific abilities back to Africa, where she became a consultant to the World Bank and the African Wildlife Foundation. In the early 1990s she was the coordinator of the Elephants Programme, working directly under Dr. Richard Leakey, for the Kenya Wildlife Service. Her ongoing research with Cynthia Moss in the Amboseli National Park, the longest study of wild elephants ever undertaken, follows the lives of more than a thousand individual animals.

  Like many scientists, Poole describes her work as all-absorbing: “Cynthia and I spent the long days watching elephants and the evenings recounting elephant gossip by candlelight,” she writes. “It was like reading a long novel that you don’t want to end. I became so engrossed in the elephants’ lives that on Sundays, when it was my duty to guard the camp, I used to will them to take the day off, too, so that I wouldn’t miss any important events in their lives.”

  She remains transfixed by elephants: “What do elephants think about?” she asks. “What kind of emotions do they experience? Can they anticipate the future? Do they contemplate the past? Do they have a sense of self? A sense of humor? An understanding of death?” Other elephant people, she says, “suspect I believe I am, in fact, an elephant. In some ways, perhaps, they are right. Like Africa, the elephants take hold of your spirit.” In her wonderful memoir, Coming of Age with Elephants, Poole’s final acknowledgment is to the elephants she has studied over the years, “for giving me a life of meaning and days of joy.” A delight in their company and an anguish in their destruction is palpable in her writing.

  When I asked Poole which experiences from her work had given her the greatest sense of exuberance, she replied: “Well, certainly the major discoveries that I have made give me, still, a great sense of buoyant and exuberant feelings. But also the day-to-day new ideas, or the recurrence of old ideas, about why elephants do the things they do, and their development into a plausible theory, give me a sense of exuberance. Some days I have none of these feelings; other days I may feel carried along by a fast-flowing stream of exciting ideas.”

  Sometimes something as simple as being able to identify a particular elephant at a distance of two kilometers will trigger a momentary sense of exuberance, she says, or being able to calm an attacking elephant by simply using her voice. The exuberance of being in the presence of elephants themselves is infectious. Poole describes the physical and psychological state of exuberance in vivid terms, with the observational eye of a good scientist. “I feel a rush of what I think of as adrenaline,” she says. “I think rapidly, thoughts falling one over the other so fast that I can hardly keep up. My heart feels as though it is beating faster. Sometimes my body almost trembles with excitement. For some reason I am very aware of my hands and fingers—a tingling sensation in my body that seems concentrated there—perhaps this is because often I am writing or driving and so my hands are the ‘doing’ part of my body in these situations and therefore I am more aware of them. I am totally ‘in the moment,’ completely focused, effervescent, buzzing, bubbling, high, on top of the world, I can do anything. I CAN.”

  Like the scientists who study creativity and wonder whether creativity leads to exultation or exultation propels creative work, Poole is uncertain about the relationship between moods and imagination. “It is hard to say what triggers what,” she observes of the overlap between her exuberance and times of discovery. “Do I have a glimmer of a good idea, and that stimulates the exuberance that is so associated with the initial ‘spark’ and the development of the idea? Or am I already in a creative phase when the glimmer of an idea strikes and the ‘exuberance’ flows? I don’t know.”

  Hope Ryden, who studies and writes about many animals—among them coyotes, mustangs, bobcats, and beavers—distinguishes between the more energetic moments of joy she experiences at times of creativity and discovery and the quiet pleasure she feels when observing animals in the wild. “Of course,” she says, “my response to what I see must be quiet, so as not to disturb my subjects.… Much of what I do is wait for something to happen, and exuberance is not compatible with that inactivity. When the action begins, however, I do feel a surge of excitement that is akin to exuberance. Nevertheless, when the animals learn to tolerate me and go about their business, my emotions settle and I watch quietly. What I feel, as I note odd bits of animal behavior, might best be described as enchantment and pleasurable empathy for my subjects who are so busily engaged in their struggle for survival.”

  The quiet mood can change abruptly, however: “I experience moments of exuberance when I see something never before recorded, or when I see something that contradicts a prevalent notion that has long been accepted as fact. At such times my competitive nature asserts itself and I feel jubilant.” She feels that exuberance, as she experiences it—“a pleasurable upwelling of excitement, a speeding up of thought and action”—is not generally useful to her in the field. “While in this state,” she explains, “the photographs I take are likely to be over- or underexposed or I may fail to notice that the film isn’t properly threaded in my camera and so is not taking up. A little exuberance, while a highly pleasurable state, goes a long way for me. Mostly I try to tamp it down to something more like the pleasurable absorption I felt as a child while engaged in certain activities, such as building a sand castle. I have to conclude that watching wildlife is like play. The child in me loves to do it.”

  • • •

  Science is beholden to the exuberance and curiosity typically associated with the adventurous spirit of childhood, and owes its furtherance to the temperamental quirks of individual scientists. James Watson, speaking at the Nobel Prize ceremonies in 1962, ended his remarks by talking about the human side of science:

  Good science as a way of life is sometimes difficult. It often is hard to have confidence that you really know where the future lies. We must thus believe strongly in our ideas, often to the point where they may seem tiresome and bothersome and even arrogant to our colleagues. I knew many people, at least when I was young, who thought I was quite unbearable. Some also thought Maurice was very strange, and others, including myself, thought that Francis was at times difficult. Fortunately we were working among wise and tolerant people who understood the spirit of scientific discov
ery and the conditions necessary for its generation. I feel that it is very important, especially for us so singularly honored, to remember that science does not stand by itself, but is the creation of very human people. We must continue to work in the humane spirit in which we were fortunate to grow up. If so, we shall help insure that our science continues and that our civilization will prevail.

  We are beholden to the human side and enthusiasm of scientists; their passion in the pursuit of reason is heady and requisite stuff indeed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True”

  (photo credit 8.1)

  Richard Feynman depressed, observed a colleague, was “just a little more cheerful than any other person when exuberant.” He was, as well, a preternaturally original thinker, irrepressibly curious, and one of the great teachers in the history of science. For me, Feynman’s legendary brilliance as a teacher is his most remarkable legacy, but then I am prejudiced. My grandmother, mother, aunt, and sister were teachers, and almost everyone else in the family—my grandfather, my father, an aunt, a great-uncle, a nephew, three cousins, my brother, and I—are, or were, professors. To teach well, I heard early and often, is to make a difference. To teach unusually well is to create magic.

  It is a magic often rooted in exuberance. Great teachers infect others with their delight in ideas, and such joy, as we have seen—whether it is sparked by teaching or through play, by music, or during the course of an experiment—alerts and intensifies the brain, making it a more teeming and generative place. Intense emotion also makes it more likely that experience will be etched into memory.

  Horror certainly does. We remember with too much clarity where we were and what we were doing when we first saw the hijacked planes fly into the World Trade Center and then, minutes later, as yet another crashed into the outer wall of the Pentagon. No one who saw this will forget. But joy, differently, also registers. We recollect moments of great pleasure and discovery—watching on a remarkable July night as the spider-legged lunar module dropped onto the moon’s surface, for instance, or listening for the first time to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis; falling in love; playing through the long evenings of childhood summers—for nature has supplied us with the means to absorb the essential and to recall the critical. Teachers are among the earliest and most powerful of these means of knowing.

  To teach is to show, and to show persuasively demands an active and enthusiastic guide. This must always have been so. Emotional disengagement in the ancient world would have been catastrophic if the young were to learn how to hunt, how to plant, and how to track the stars. The stakes were high: to motivate their wards would have been requisite for the first teachers—the parents and shamans, the priests and the tribal elders. Passing on knowledge about the behavior of the natural world from the emerging sciences of astronomy, agriculture, and medicine would have been among a society’s first priorities. The great natural scientists, such as Hippocrates and Aristotle, Lucretius and Hipparchus, not only studied the ways of man and of the heavens but also taught what they knew to others. In turn, a few of those whom they taught observed the world in their own and slightly different ways, added to the stock of what was known, created a new understanding, and passed it on. “All vigor is contagious,” said Emerson, “and when we see creation we also begin to create.” When we see a glimpse of creation through the eyes of an enthusiast, our imaginative response is intensified.

  Joy is essential to this. The pleasures of play, which attend and abet learning in young children, must perpetuate if they are to continue to reward inquisitiveness as children grow older. Thoreau wrote of his boyhood: “My life was extacy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses—I can remember that I was all alive.… This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To have such sweet impressions made on us, such extacies begotten of the breezes. I can remember how I was astonished. I said to myself, —I said to others, —‘There comes into my mind or soul such an indescribable, infinite all absorbing, divine heavenly pleasure, a sense of elevation & expansion—and [I] have had nought to do with it. I perceive that I am dealt with by superior powers. This is a pleasure, a joy, an existence which I have not procured myself—I speak as a witness on the stand and tell what I have perceived.’ ” Responsiveness to the natural world gives rise to knowledge; it begets curiosity and exploration.

  Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens. In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams writes that to a New England boy “Summer was drunken.” Each of his senses, he says, was assaulted and charged. Smell was the strongest, the unforgettable scents of “hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes.” And then came taste. The children, said Adams, “knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a spelling-book.” Smell and taste, touch and sight, are, of course, the ancient mammalian paths of learning: a whack of paws, a pungent scent, a shriek: all teach fast and enduringly. Adams writes that even sixty years out of childhood he could revive on his tongue the memory of his spelling book, “the taste of A-B, AB,” and with ease and a kind of sweet ferocity could recall the colors taught him by the summer days. A peony and a sense of blue, he recollected late in life, would always be for him the sea near Quincy and “the cumuli in a June afternoon sky.” The happiest hours of his education were, he said, “passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading … and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole [I] learned most then.” Like most, he learned best under the spell of nature.

  Science, like the arts, is rooted in the desire to understand and then create; society requires that this desire be transferred to succeeding generations. It is teachers who convey it, especially exuberant ones. Exuberance is a dispositional thread in the lives of great teachers and scientists, and most of them, in turn, kindle enthusiasm and curiosity in their students. Great scientists who are also extraordinary teachers—Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and Richard Feynman, for example—give us a glimpse into how a passionate temperament and a love of discovery fire up enthusiasm in those they teach. (It goes both ways, of course. “The justification for a university,” said Alfred North Whitehead, “is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest for life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.” The enthusiastic young act upon those by whom they are taught.) Not all brilliant scientists are spellbinding teachers, of course. Newton famously was not. When he lectured, a Cambridge contemporary declared, “so few went to hear Him, & fewer yt understood him, yt oftimes he did in a manner, for want of Hearers, read to ye Walls.” Newton was temperamentally unsuited to be a great teacher. He was by nature solitary and wary of others, and whatever passion he had for his work he never directly transmitted to the students who might have been inspired by it.

  But Newton’s ideas, of course, were a different matter. One hundred years later, even poets were caught up in the intellectual excitement generated by his discoveries. Lord Byron, whose personality was the opposite of Newton’s in nearly every particular, was fascinated by the observations of Newton and other scientists: “When Newton saw an apple fall,” Byron wrote marvelously in Don Juan,

  he found

  In that slight startle from his contemplation

  · · · · · · · ·

  A mode of proving that the earth turned round

  In a most natural whirl called ‘Gravitation;’

  And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,

  Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple.

  (It is a pity Byron never taught, for the same vivacity and wit that Newton lacked Byron had in glut.)

  Byron and his fellow poets were
not alone in being swept up in the nineteenth century’s excitement at scientific discovery. In Europe and America the public paid rapt attention to the remarkable progress of scientists as they began to unravel the workings of the natural world. Scientific knowledge was widely disseminated by popular writers and journalists, and the impact of science on daily life was readily apparent from advances in agriculture, technology, and medicine. Interest in science was further galvanized by public talks on scientific topics.

  Indisputably, the dynamic lectures given by Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, which had been established in 1799 to encourage the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the general public, were among the most influential and widely attended in history. Davy’s enthusiastic teaching had a lasting and profound impact on scientists and nonscientists alike. He was, says one biographer, “a star”; when he lectured “buckles flew, stays popped.” Those who knew Davy personally were struck by his vivacity and unstoppable enthusiasm. He “talks rapidly, though with great precision,” said one observer, “and is so much interested in conversation that his excitement amounts to nervous impatience and keeps him in constant motion.” Robert Southey concurred, noting, “I have never witnessed such indefatigable activity in any other man.” He was, remarked more than one acquaintance, a flurry of ideas. Michael Faraday, who began his scientific career as Davy’s laboratory assistant, said that Davy’s temperament was passionate and restless; so, too, was his mind, which, according to the president of the Royal Institution, was “naturally ardent and speculative.”