Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Mitchell, like Patton, was a complicated, enthusiastic, and angry man. Alfred Hurley, in his book Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power, speaks of this complexity: “He erred in believing that the realization of his vision would justify his tactics. Those tactics included his denial of the integrity of an often equally dedicated opposition, his substitution of promises for performance, and his failure to sustain the kind of day-to-day self-effacing effort that builds any institution, whether military or otherwise.” But, Hurley concludes, “Americans might well regard Mitchell as one of the extraordinary men in their history, one who employed some remarkable gifts and unusual energy in trying to alert his countrymen to the promise of aviation. Indeed, every age has had its crusaders—men like Mitchell whose relentless insistence on the correctness of their beliefs ultimately destroyed them. In the interim, however, their zeal also sustained them in combating the antagonism of the shortsighted.” Mitchell’s was a passionate life in pursuit of reason, but few saw it that way at the time. A more temperate man would have been less grating, but he would not have been Billy Mitchell.

  It is obvious that not all exuberance is tethered to reality, nor is it always put to the common good. Strong passions, like fire, can civilize or kill. Daedalus, believing he was according his son the freedom of the air, made him wings of wax and feathers and taught him how to fly. He warned Icarus of the dangers of the sun’s heat, but, writes Ovid, the son

  began to feel the joy

  Of beating wings in air and steered his course

  Beyond his father’s lead: all the wide sky

  Was there to tempt him as he steered toward heaven.

  Meanwhile the heat of sun struck at his back

  And where his wings were joined, sweet-smelling fluid

  Ran hot that once was wax. His naked arms

  Whirled into wind; his lips, still calling out

  His father’s name, were gulfed in the dark sea.

  Icarus brought daring to the air and found joy and death; Daedalus brought caution. Both count. Daedalus lived, but Icarus is the stuff of legend. “Who cares that he fell back to the sea?” asked Anne Sexton: “See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down/while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.”

  The raptures of the air and sea can lead to peril. In 1965, the Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White spent nearly half an hour somersaulting, floating, and space-walking outside his spacecraft. He was so euphoric that his fellow astronaut Gus Grissom, tracking him from Mission Control in Houston, worried about his safety. The astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton give their account of what happened next: “ ‘Gemini Four,’ Gus called in a stern voice, ‘get back in.’ [Crew mate James] McDivitt called to White, still frolicking outside. ‘They want you to get back in now.’ Ed White didn’t want to return to the cockpit. ‘This is fun!’ he said exuberantly. ‘I don’t want to come back in, but I’m coming.’ ” The diver and adventurer Hans Hess has written of the seductiveness of deep-ocean exploration. Below a depth of 160 feet, he says, a “deep sea intoxication” occurs. “One loses all misgivings and inhibitions. The abyss below becomes a pleasant walk. Why not? A little bit further—why not? And then suddenly comes the end, without one even being aware of it. Death catches the diver in a butterfly net whose mesh is so soft that it closes in on him unnoticed.”

  Most strong enthusiasms are of no danger, and they add color not only to the lives of those who hold them but to those in their presence as well. Several years ago I was asked by Nature to review Eccentrics, a captivating book by David Weeks and Jamie James that discusses at length the enthusiasms of notable eccentrics—a woman who collected 7,500 garden gnomes, for instance, and a nineteenth-century man who, having been expelled from both Westminster and Harrow, spent £500,000 on alcohol in less than twenty years and kept, at one time, two thousand dogs, which he fed Champagne and steak. At one of his dinner parties he dressed in full hunt regalia and rode on the back of a bear; the latter, perhaps not surprisingly, was less amused than the guests and ate part of his rider’s leg. In a tale for our materialistic times, the authors also recount the story of a man who moved to Sherwood Forest, dressed up in green, carried a longbow, and called himself Robin Hood. Prior to taking up his new identity he had, appropriately enough, earned his living by installing automatic cash-dispensing machines.

  Many of the individuals portrayed by Weeks and James had symptoms of grandiose and delusional thinking, which are associated with mania, yet almost all were happy with their lives. They were exuberant, unusually assertive, and remarkably curious as well. Few were shy or timid. The authors struggled with the distinction between “vivid imaginings” and delusions; it was “no easy matter,” they concluded, “to clarify the line of demarcation between eccentricity and mental illness.”

  Eric Hansen, in Orchid Fever, also describes the thin line separating enthusiasm from pathological exuberance. He interviewed one orchid grower who had started off with a single windowsill plant but then, he told Hansen, “[p]retty soon I decided I wanted another orchid. First a red one, then a pink one, then I had to have a white one with spots.… I couldn’t stop.… Now I have a 2,200-square-foot greenhouse with about 200,000 plants.” Another enthusiast talked about how his first wife couldn’t handle his obsession: “One morning she sat him down at the breakfast table and explained that he would have to choose between his orchid collection and their marriage. ‘That’s the easiest decision I’ll ever make,’ he told her. ‘You’re out of here, baby!’ ”

  Once a person has been “properly seduced” by the sight or scent of an orchid, Hansen says, “he or she has little choice but to collect or buy the plant, take it home, build a special enclosure for it, feed, water, and groom the thing, and then dote over the plant for years. These people usually park their cars on the street because their garages are filled to capacity with potting tables surrounded with commercial quantities of cork bark, oyster shell, crushed dolomite, sphagnum moss, twist ties, horticultural charcoal, several different types of fertilizers, insecticides, pots, baskets, respirators, protective rubber clothing, Perlite, tree ferns, and gardening stakes. These orchid people … cater to the needs of their beloved orchids with a single-minded devotion that blurs the line between love and lunacy.”

  There is no absolute border between a delight in life and a delight that is a manifestation of a potentially pathological state such as mania. Sir Humphry Davy, in discussing the dangers of unskeptical enthusiasm, put it well: “In a person of irritable temperament, when the organization is perfect, and the body in a state of perfect health, the spirits rise sometimes almost to madness, trains of pleasurable ideas producing raptures introduce themselves into the Mind, all the ideas of self excellence are enlarged.… He imagines himself to be the peculiar favourite of the Deity.… This enthusiasm tho’ rare at first[,] promoted and indulged in becomes at length habitual[,] and increased in a very high degree is absolute Insanity.”

  Where does exuberance end and mania begin? What is eccentricity, or simply a normal variation in temperament, and when does it tip over into irrational exuberance and psychopathology? We do not know. The edges of mania may be exhilarating, as Clifford Beers relates in A Mind That Found Itself—“It seemed as though the refreshing breath of some kind Goddess of Wisdom was being blown gently against the surface of my brain.… So delicate, so crisp and exhilarating was it that words fail me in my attempt to describe it”—but mania itself, as Beers knew from his long months in the asylum, is a dangerous place. A slightly fevered and manic brain may be adaptive: James Watson, for example, when asked about why the genes for manic-depressive illness survive in the gene pool, responded, “Survival might often depend on not if we think two and two is four, but on being slightly wild. Because life is just much more complicated than when we try to organize it. And so a brain which is slightly disconnected from reality might be a good thing. I think when we do science we see that a little madness does help, and you propose bizarre things which everyone says can’t
be true. Conceivably what you need is sometimes just to start up with a different set of facts.” But too much fever destroys the brain.

  Normal exuberance can escalate into pathological enthusiasm, anger, or even mania. Those who have what Emil Kraepelin called a “manic predisposition” are not only extraverted, cheerful, and overly optimistic, they also possess highly unstable and irritable moods. Indeed, those most inclined to exuberance are often most subject to despair and hopelessness. These dark sides of exuberance both help and hinder: if enthusiasm switches quickly to wrath or is bound too often to impetuous action, many of the dangers we have discussed are made more likely. If melancholy gives a humanizing perspective to exuberance, however, there is less risk of hazardous behavior and shallow thought. As we shall see, a close familiarity with both exuberance and despair may lead to a profound understanding of human nature, as well as an ability to more complexly express it in the arts and sciences.

  Moderation in strong emotions is not always easily come by. Lucretius observed two thousand years ago that the destructive motions “can never permanently get the upper hand and entomb vitality for evermore. Neither can the generative and augmentative motions permanently safeguard what they have created. So the war of the elements that has raged throughout eternity continues on equal terms.” More often than not, the war is a struggle within as much as without: opposing natures reside within the same person; positive forces of mood and energy alternate or coexist with threatening or nihilistic ones. Exuberance does not stand alone; it exists in a landscape of other emotions and circumstance.

  For some, intense and opposing emotions are an integral part of their temperament or mood disorder. Cyclothymia, for example, is a form of manic-depressive illness that consists of short cycles of depression and mild mania interspersed with periods of normal mood and behavior. Usually exuberant individuals may be subject to days or weeks of low energy and dejection. These cyclothymics, wrote the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, “have a soft temperament which can swing to great extremes. The path over which it swings is a wide one, namely between cheerfulness and unhappiness.… Not only is the hypomanic disposition well known to be a particularly labile one, which also has leanings in the depressive direction, but many of these cheerful natures have when we get to know them better a permanent melancholic element in the background of their being.” The elements remain in flux: “The hypomanic and melancholic halves of the cycloid temperament relieve one another,” continued Kretschmer, and “form layers or patterns in individual cases, arranged in the most varied combinations.”

  Moods are mutable. They swing into and out of one another, for joy and grief inhabit close and traversable lands. New Orleans funeral marches begin with dirgeful music during the procession to the cemetery but, on the return journey, exuberance bounds back. As the music critic Ben Ratliff describes it, “the drummer takes the muffling handkerchief off the snare drum and lays down some opening rolls, and the songs turn up-tempo and cheerful, with a wildly multileveled polyphonic chatter that we all know is closer to the usual experience of life.” Any song, says Jelly Roll Morton, can be played as “blues” or “joys.”

  It is not always easy to believe that the same individual might, as Byron put it, have under the same skin “two or three within.” Those apparently exuberant are less often recognized as having a darker side, and those cast as doomed or depressive may never be seen for the liveliness they actually possess. Virginia Woolf is remembered more for her madness and suicide than for her vitality, despite the testament of her friends to her animation and dazzling laughter. Christopher Isherwood recalled that “listening to [Woolf] we missed appointments, forgot love-affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours,” and Nigel Nicolson spoke of her vivacity: “One would hand her a bit of information as dull as a lump of lead,” he said. “She would hand it back glittering like diamonds. I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two glasses of an excellent champagne. She was a life-enhancer.” Elizabeth Bowen, while recognizing Woolf’s ultimate fate, put her suicidal depression in the context of the rest of her life:

  I was aware, one could not but be aware, of an undertow often of sadness, of melancholy, of great fear. But the main impression was of a creature of laughter and movement. In the Diary she says, “I enjoy everything I do.” Do you remember?—it was on a good day. And her power in conveying enjoyment was extraordinary. And her laughter was entrancing, it was outrageous laughter, almost like a child’s laughter. Whoops of laughter, if anything amused her. As it happened, the last day I saw her I was staying at Rodmell and I remember her kneeling back on the floor—we were tacking away, mending a torn Spanish curtain in the house—and she sat back on her heels and put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun. Then she laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful, hooting way. And that is what has remained with me. So I get a curious shock when I see people regarding her entirely as a martyred … or definitely tragic sort of person, claimed by the darkness. She ended, as far as we know, in darkness, but—where is she now? Nobody with that capacity for joy, I think, can be nowhere. And it was joy.

  Yet it remains difficult to keep in mind the duality of moods. The prevailing mood tends to dominate the emotional landscape, both for the person and for those in its sphere of influence. James Barrie’s private secretary, Cynthia Asquith, described the effect of his inconstant moods on those around him: “No pen could convey how widely Barrie varies. One day he looks so weary, sallow, lacklustre, that had I to ‘do’ him in our analogy game I’d compare him to a full ash-tray and an empty ink bottle; the next day he may look positively tingling with health—alert, aglow … of course, such a strong—such an overwhelmingly strong—personality has the most terrific effect on others. When he’s grey ashes, he’s devastatingly depressing. It’s almost impossible to fight against the influence. On the other hand, on his good days, he’s so alive, so full of charm—more than charm—a kind of benign wizardry, that it makes one feel well and happy.”

  It was Barrie’s fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson, however, who wrote most brilliantly on the duality of moods and human nature, articulated so clearly the beholdenness of light moods to darker elements, and made explicit that gaiety carries a price. Stevenson was drawn to the darker sides of human character—evil and despair and malignant hypocrisy—but he was as aware of the joy of adventure, the delights of friendship, and the saving, high pleasures of life.

  Stevenson was, by all accounts, a vivacious, immensely charming, and mercurial man. Edmund Gosse said that “gaiety” was his cardinal quality. “A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him,” Gosse wrote. “He seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling.” Another friend, Sidney Colvin, said that the “most robust and ordinary men seemed to turn dim and null in presence of the vitality that glowed in the steadfast, penetrating fire of the lean man’s eyes, the rich, compelling charm of his smile … and lively expressiveness of his gestures.” Within an hour of first meeting, he said, Stevenson “had captivated the whole household.… He sped those summer nights and days for us all as I have scarce known any sped before or since.” Stevenson’s stepchildren agreed. Belle Osbourne wrote of him that he “brought into our lives a sort of joyousness hard to describe,” and Lloyd, her brother, observed that he was “so gay and buoyant that he kept every one in fits of laughter.” The poet Andrew Lang remarked that Stevenson so “excited a passionate admiration and affection” in people that they “warmed their hands at that centre of light and heat.”

  Stevenson, said Henry James, had “substance and spirit”; he was someone whom “life carries swiftly before it and who signal and communicate, not to say gesticulate, as they go. He lived to the topmost pulse.” When Stevenson died, James wrote: “He [had] lighted up a whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination … he had the best of it—the thick of the fray, the loudest of the music.” James Barrie, stricken by Stevenson’s death, felt his absence acutely: “When I ca
me to London,” he said, “there was a blank spot in it; Stevenson had gone. It could not be filled till he came back, and he never came back. I saw it again in Edinburgh the other day. It is not necessarily that he was the greatest, I don’t think he was the greatest, but of the men we might have seen he is the one we would like best to come back.”

  But Stevenson was also described by those who knew him as excitable, high-strung, and inclined to restlessness, moodiness, and fits of rage. He was quick to the boil and wept easily. “It was not in Louis to remain long in any mood,” said Edmund Gosse; “he was as restless and questing as a Spaniel.” Andrew Lang, too, noticed Stevenson’s erratic nature. There was, he said, “a sort of uncommon celerity in changing expression, in thought and speech.” His legendary restlessness was summed up most graphically by Henry Adams, who said that Stevenson “seems never to rest, but perches like a parrot on every available projection, jumping from one to another, and talking incessantly.” Keeping to his bird analogy, but switching species, Adams wrote to another friend that Stevenson looked like “an insane stork, very warm and very restless.” An acquaintance of Stevenson’s in Samoa concurred: “He was as active and restless as if his veins had been filled with quicksilver.”

  W. E. Henley wrote of Stevenson that he was as “mutable as the sea, / The brown eyes radiant with vivacity … /A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace / Of passion, impudence, and energy.” Another friend said that “there were two Stevensons … this strange dual personality … I have seen him in all moods … chatting away in the calmest manner possible; and I have seen him become suddenly agitated, jump from that table and stalk to and fro across the floor like some wild forest animal … his face would glow and his eyes would flash, darkening, lighting, scintillating, hypnotising you with their brilliance and the burning fires within.” Stevenson had, in short, a febrile temperament.