Peter Ackroyd writes of a similar beauty and life force in the wake of the German bombings of London during World War II. “It was the invisible and intangible spirit or presence of London that survived and somehow flourished,” he says.
London itself would rise again. There was even a natural analogy. Air damage to the herbarium in the Natural History Museum meant that certain seeds became damp, including mimosa brought from China in 1793. After their trance of 147 years, they began to grow again.
Yet there was also a curious interval when the natural world was reaffirmed in another sense. One contemporary has described how “many acres of the most famous city in the world have changed from the feverish hum and activity of man into a desolate area grown over with brightly coloured flowers and mysterious with wildlife.” … [The streets] bloomed [with] ragwort, lilies of the valley, white and mauve lilac. “Quiet lanes lead to patches of wild flowers and undergrowth not seen in these parts since the days of Henry VIII.” … This earth had been covered with buildings for more than seven centuries, and yet its natural fertility was revived. It is indirect testimony, perhaps, to the force and power of London which kept this “fertility” at bay. The power of the city and the power of nature had fought an unequal battle, until the city was injured; then the plants, and the birds, returned.
For some who lose hope and vitality, nature will act on its own, as it did in London and the Somme, to reinfuse life. However dreadful the circumstances—death or madness, war, betrayal—the passion for life will surge back. For these individuals, it is an innate and irrepressible force; they are, in every true sense, exuberant by nature. For others, joy and laughter seep back in more slowly. They are less resilient; their healing is more hesitant and perhaps less complete. By whatever means joy comes back—however naturally or however haltingly—it is an amazing thing that it does. It is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.
The love for life returns in a profusion of ways. Biologist Joyce Poole, for example, writes that only Africa’s natural beauty could heal the terrible pain she knew following the slaughter of the elephants she had studied and loved. Great matriarchs had been butchered by ivory poachers and entire family groups destroyed. By the time Poole left Amboseli, she writes, “I could no longer take any pleasure from the sights and smells and feelings that had once been so evocative.” She watched on television as Kenya burned tons of ivory: “As the flames consumed the remains of so many elephants’ lives, I cried for the thousands of violent deaths those elephants had suffered and for the hundreds of orphans still running bewildered through the Tsavo bush.… My dreams went up in smoke with the ivory, and I was left shattered and brittle like so many sharp-edged pieces of the burnt-to-blue ivory.… [T]he remaining magic had gone, and my bush life filled me with a terrible emptiness.”
Only Africa itself could restore life. Poole recounts an early-morning flight she took with Richard Leakey long after she had watched the ivory burn:
There were no roads here, and only the narrow cattle tracks crisscrossed the dry plains. A few Maasai settlements dotted the otherwise flat, desolate landscape. I looked ahead as Richard pointed out the two mountains that bordered the southern end of Lake Natron: Gelai and Lenkai. As we rounded the slope of Oldoinyo Gelai, one of the most breathtakingly beautiful sights in the world met my eyes, a kaleidoscope of colors, patterns, and movement, and changing horizons: the intense pinks of the lake, the soft blues of the mountains, and the millions of wing beats of the flamingos. As I watched the shifting light and colors, I found myself speechless, witnessing the exquisite beauty of Africa in juxtaposition with so many bittersweet memories. It had been so many years since I had allowed myself really to feel the beauty in anything.… I had been trying to discover my passion for life again and could not seem to find it.
Even under the most unforgivable circumstances, some joy and defiance exist. In 1850, Frederick Douglass said, “I admit that the slave does sometimes sing, dance, and appear to be merry. But what does this prove? It only proves to my mind, that though slavery is armed with a thousand strings, it is not able entirely to kill the elastic spirit of the bondman. That spirit will rise and walk abroad, despite of whips and chains, and extract from the cup of nature, occasional drops of joy and gladness. No thanks to the slaveholder, nor to slavery, that the vivacious captive may sometimes dance in his chains, his very mirth in such circumstances, stands before God, as an accusing angel against his enslaver.” Even drops of joy abet defiance and make suffering more endurable.
Exuberance defies in strange and powerful ways; it asserts a future that others contrive to deny. Philippe Petit, a French juggler and acrobat, rigged a cable between the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center in 1974 and made eight crossings a quarter of a mile above the ground. He was exultant. “I sit down on the wire, balancing pole on my lap. Leaning against the steel corner, I offer to myself, for a throne, the highest tower ever built by man; for a ceremonial carpet, the most savagely gigantic city of the Americas; for my dominion, a tray of seas wetting my forehead; while the folds of my wind-sculpted cape surround me with majestically mortal whirls. I rise, standing up on the wire.… I start walking. And walking, and walking.” It is a sacred expedition, he chants to himself, a mythological journey. He calls out to the “gods of the billion constellations”: “Watch closely. You’re not going to believe your zillion eyes.… Standing up again, I recognize I am at the top of the world, with all of New York City at my feet! How not to laugh with joy? I laugh with joy—and conclude the crossing with ecstasy instead of oxygen in my lungs.”
After the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, Philippe Petit offered up his song again. Defy, he said. Fight terror with what is great in the human spirit. Build:
Let us print WE SHALL NOT BE DOOMED and paste the message high in the sky, for all in the world to read aloud.
Let us rebuild the twin towers.
We need the fuel of time and money, the mortar of ideas.…
Bring yours.
Here is mine.… Architects, please make them more magnificent—try a twist, a quarter turn along their longitudinal axes. Make them higher—yes, one more floor, so they reach III stories high.…
When the towers again twin-tickle the clouds, I offer to walk again, to be the expression of the builders’ collective voice. Together, we will rejoice in an aerial song of victory. I will carry my life across the wire, as your life, as all our lives, past, present, and future—the lives lost, the lives welcomed since.
We can overcome.
The future, to act in its fullest, needs all the exuberance it can call in. It is true, as President William Jefferson Clinton said, that we are a questing people, but questing—and the energy and enthusiasm to fuel it—must be kept topped up. To explore requires vitality and curiosity; complaisance is death to discovery and to its attendant joy. If, as individuals or as a country, we stop pursuing new frontiers, become glutted on our past rather than drawn to the future, we will cease to be explorers. Exuberance is the headwater of motion, as it is of resilience; to lose our joy is to lose our ability to fight back and to advance. We have gone west and to the moon, but we need to bring a like passion to exploring the sea and the brain, to chasing comets and tracking down the first light in the universe, to writing symphonies and seeking social justice.
In 1962, President Kennedy said, “The United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward.” This is a theme returned to time and again, and with great eloquence, by Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who orbited the moon as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked it. He writes, in Carrying the Fire, that
our nation’s strength has always derived from our youthful pioneers.… Some people were never content to huddle in protective little clumps along the East Coast, but pushed westward as boldly as circumstances permitted. When horizontal exploration met its limits, it was time
to try the vertical, and thus has it been since, ever higher and faster.
Now we have the capability to leave the planet, and I think we should give careful consideration to taking that option. Man has always gone where he has been able to go, it is a basic satisfaction of his inquisitive nature, and I think we all lose a little bit if we choose to turn our backs on further exploration. Exploration produces a mood in people, a widening of interest, a stimulation of the thought process, and I hate to see it wither.
Collins spoke to the same point in his address to the Congress not long after Apollo 11 had returned to earth. “Man has always gone where he has been able to go,” he said. “It’s that simple. He will continue pushing back his frontier, no matter how far it may carry him from his homeland.” The Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean said much the same thing nearly thirty-five years later. Nothing, he declared, is going to change the “inexorable motion of human beings off this planet and out into the universe.” For those of us who remember that magical July night in 1969 when Armstrong and Aldrin walked upon the moon as Collins circled it: we hope so.
Michael Collins describes his thoughts and the immensity of his solitude while orbiting the moon: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully—not as fear or loneliness—but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling.” He starts to turn off the lights in Columbia so he can get some sleep and, as he looks around the spacecraft, he is taken back to his childhood days:
As I scurry about, blocking off the windows with metal plates and dousing the lights, I have almost the same feeling I used to have years ago when, as an altar boy, I snuffed out the candles one by one at the end of a long service. Come to think of it, with the center couch removed, Columbia’s floor plan is not unlike that of the National Cathedral, where I used to serve. Certainly it is cruciform, with the tunnel up above where the bell tower would be, and the navigation instruments at the altar. The main instrument panels span the north and south transepts, while the nave is where the center couch used to be. If not a miniature cathedral, then at least it is a happy home, and I have no hesitation about leaving its care to God and Houston.
Five years later, a special service of commemoration and thanksgiving was held at the National Cathedral in Washington. A new stained-glass window, depicting swirling stars and orbiting planets floating in deep space, was dedicated. A narrow white line traces round the planets, representing the trajectory of a spacecraft. Carved near the window is a print of an astronaut’s boot on the surface of the moon, and embedded in the window itself is a piece of lunar rock collected by the Apollo 11 astronauts. Underneath the stars, at the bottom of the window in scarcely noticeable lettering, is an inscription taken from the book of Job: “Is not God in the height of heaven?” It is a question Hipparchus must have asked and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin surely did.
We have, in echo of this, always sung up great hymns of praise and wonder to the heavens. We have joined our exuberance to that of nature and hoped, in some measure, that ours will be as generous. We recognize that the joyous need not only sanction but shield, that the possibility of renewal brings joy, and that renewal is in turn made more likely by joy. In the words of the nineteenth-century hymn, an exultant song rings triumphant over despair:
My life flows on in endless song;
Above Earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
A passion for life is life’s ultimate affirmation. To ask the question is to know this to be so; it is to know that exuberance is a god within:
How can I keep from singing?
Notes
Chapter 1: “Incapable of Being Indifferent”
1. “Shield your joyous ones”: Variations of this prayer appear in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, The Book of Common Prayer of the U.S. Episcopal church, and the Church of Scotland’s “An Order of a Service of Healing.”
2. “Under every grief & pine”: William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” lines 61–62, in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and the Complete Poetry of William Blake (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 598.
3. “The Greeks understood”: quoted in R. J. Dubos, Louis Pasteur (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), p. 391.
4. as the psalm promises: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” Psalms 30:5.
5. “Why should man want to fly at all?”: Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis (1953; New York: Scribners, 2003), p. 269.
6. “Our earliest records”: Charles A. Lindbergh, Autobiography of Values (1976; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p. 352.
7. “create infectious enthusiasm”: Lou Dobbs said of Ted Turner, “He is a natural-born leader. I once asked him his definition of a leader. He said, ‘A leader has the ability to create infectious enthusiasm.’ ” Quoted in Ken Auletta, “The Lost Tycoon,” The New Yorker, April 23 and 30, 2001, p. 148.
8. Life for Theodore Roosevelt: In addition to the specific works cited, the following general works, among others, were consulted for the section on Theodore Roosevelt: Corrinne Roosevelt Robinson, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Scribners, 1921); Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858–1886 (New York: Scribners, 1958); William H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Edmund Morris, The Rise of Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979); David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981); H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001).
9. “unpacking of endless Christmas stockings”: Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, Roman Spring: Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), p. 195.
10. “literally delirious joy”: Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (1913; New York: Da Capo, 1985), p. 7.
11. “who knows the great enthusiasms”: Theodore Roosevelt, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 20 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1928), vol. 13, pp. 506–29.
12. “I never knew any one”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, p. 9.
13. “went by in a round”: ibid., p. 7.
14. “What an excitement”: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to his mother, April 28, 1868, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, 8 vols., ed. E. E. Morison, J. M. Blum, and J. J. Buckley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–54), vol. 1, p. 3.
15. One debutante said: Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: William Morrow, 1992), quoted on p. 72.
16. “unquenchable gaiety”: ibid., pp. 61–62.
17. “I should almost perish”: Theodore Roosevelt, diary entry, February 12, 1878, in Theodore Roosevelt’s Diaries of Boyhood and Youth (New York: Scribners, 1928).
18. “Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss”: Miller, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 81.
19. “He’ll kill himself”: quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979; New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 75.
20. “I am of a very buoyant temper”: letter from Theodore Roosevelt to his sister, March 3, 1878, Letters, vol. 1, p. 32.
21. “rose like a rocket”: letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., October 20, 1903, Letters, vol. 3, p. 635.
22. “You could not talk to him”: Miller, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 157.
23. “The light has gone out”: Roosevelt, diary entry, February 14, 1884, in Diaries.
24. “black care rarely sits”: Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, National Edition (New York: Scribners, 1926), vol. 1, p. 329; first publ
ished in 1888. He wrote, “These long, swift rides in the glorious spring mornings are not soon to be forgotten. The sweet, fresh air, with a touch of sharpness thus early in the day, and the rapid motion of the fiery little horses combine to make a man’s blood thrill and leap with the sheer buoyant lightheartedness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness and freedom of the life he is leading” (ibid.).
25. “We felt the beat”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, p. 95.
26. “I enjoyed life to the full”: ibid., p. 96.
27. “wanted to put an end”: Miller, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 205.
28. “I curled up on the seat”: quoted in Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, p. 493.
29. “energy and enthusiasm”: Richard Harding Davis, quoted in Miller, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 284.
30. “bully,” “the great day”: Roosevelt’s account of the war is given in Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders, in Works, National Edition, vol. 11, p. 81; first published in 1899.
31. “The President goes from one to another”: William Bayard Hale, A Week in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Putnam, 1908).
32. “You go into Roosevelt’s presence”: Mark Sullivan, Our Times: 1900–1925, 6 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1926–35), vol. 3, p. 81.
33. “You must always remember”: Cecil Spring-Rice was Roosevelt’s best man when he married Edith Carow. His comment about Roosevelt is quoted in Miller, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 50.
Exuberance: The Passion for Life Page 31