119. “When I came to London”: quoted in Letters of J. M. Barrie, ed. Viola Meynell (New York: Scribners, 1947), p. 250.
120. “It was not in Louis”: quoted in The Robert Louis Stevenson Companion, p. 47.
121. “he was as restless”: quoted ibid., p. 43.
122. “a sort of uncommon celerity”: quoted in Terry, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 58.
123. “seems never to rest”: Henry Adams, “Queer Birds—Mighty Queer Ones Too,” in Terry, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 158.
124. “an insane stork”: quoted ibid., p. 160.
125. “He was as active”: S. J. Whitnee, quoted in Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 477.
126. “mutable as the sea”: W. E. Henley, early draft of “Apparition,” quoted ibid., p. 91.
127. “there were two Stevensons”: H. J. Moors, With Stevenson in Samoa (London: Small, Maynard and Co., 1910), p. 29.
128. “It is in vain”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Crabbed Age and Youth,” in The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 63; essay first published in 1877.
129. “My childhood”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to William Archer, 1885, quoted in McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 17.
130. “The family evil”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Christmas Sermon” (New York: Scribners, 1900), p. 15.
131. “a profound essential melancholy”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer,” in The Lantern-Bearers, pp. 213–15; essay first published in 1887.
132. “At one moment”: McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 83.
133. “ah! what bonds we have”: Robert Louis Stevenson, letter to W. Craibe Angus, April 1891, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol. 7: September 1890-December 1892 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 110.
134. “I’m getting tired”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Baxter, January 16, 1873, in Letters, vol. 1: 1854-April 1874, pp. 271–72. In the same letter Stevenson describes his brain as “just like a wet sponge: soft, pulpy, and lying spread out, flat and flacid, over my eyes” (p. 271).
135. “You will understand”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Frances Sitwell, September 12, 1873, ibid., vol. 1, p. 298.
136. “If you knew how old I felt”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Frances Sitwell, November 21, 1873, ibid., vol. 1, p. 374.
137. “The world is disenchanted”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Ordered South,” in Essays and Poems (London: J. M. Dent, 1992), p. 5; essay first published in 1874.
138. “Black care was sitting”: Robert Louis Stevenson, The Cevennes Journal: Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands, ed. Gordon Golding (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1978), p. 107.
139. “Insomnia is the opposite pole”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Edmund Gosse, July 1881, in Letters, vol. 3, p. 202.
140. “devilish little left to live for”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Baxter, May 21, 1888, in Letters, vol. 6: August 1887-September 1890, p. 191.
141. “Half of the ills”: Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 387.
142. “Health I enjoy”: letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Henry James, August 19, 1890, in Letters, vol. 6, pp. 402–3.
143. “Drinks plenty”: Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to J. M. Barrie, April 2 or 3, 1893, in Letters, vol. 8, p. 44.
144. “every guarantee”: Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Norton Critical Edition (1886; New York: Norton, 2003), p. 47.
145. “certain impatient gaiety”: ibid., pp. 47–48.
146. “I thus drew steadily nearer”: ibid., pp. 48–49.
147. “younger, lighter, happier”: ibid., p. 50.
148. “like a mill race”: ibid.
149. “solution of the bonds of obligation”: ibid.
150. “tenfold more wicked”: ibid.
151. “screwed to the topmost peg”: ibid., p. 56.
152. “contempt of danger”: ibid., p. 58.
153. “spring headlong”: ibid., p. 52.
154. “In these flashing revelations”: Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852; New York: Signet, 1964), p. 114.
155. “Write with fury”: Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 380.
156. “Keep your early enthusiasm”: Louis Pasteur, speech given at the opening of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, November 14, 1888, in René Valery-Radot’s The Life of Pasteur, vol. 2, trans. R. L. Devonshire (London: Constable, 1911), pp. 221–22.
Chapter 10: “It Is Not Down in Any Map”
1. “It Is Not Down in Any Map”: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; Berkeley: University of California, 1979), p. 57.
2. “giddy humor”: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 23.
3. “vast and unpeopled countries”: ibid., p. 25.
4. “casualties of the sea”: ibid., p. 26.
5. “sore sicknesses and grievous diseases”: ibid.
6. “The very hearing of these things”: ibid.
7. “All great and honourable actions”: ibid., p. 27.
8. “It was granted the dangers were great”: ibid.
9. “good and honourable”: ibid.
10. “yet might they have comfort”: ibid.
11. “This land was an enigma”: Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913; New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 15.
12. “wanted to be let alone”: ibid., p. 10.
13. “A pioneer should have imagination”: ibid., p. 33.
14. “In a pack on his back”: Vachel Lindsay, “In Praise of Johnny Appleseed,” in Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems (Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, 1976), pp. 84–85.
15. “Love’s orchards climbed”: ibid., p. 90.
16. “He saw the fruits unfold”: ibid., p. 91. At the beginning of Douglas Dunn’s poem “The Apple Tree,” he quotes Martin Luther—“And if the world should end tomorrow, I still would plant my apple tree”—and then goes on to speak beautifully of perseverance, of holding on to the past and reaching out to the future:
Tonight I saw the stars trapped underneath the water.
I signed the simple covenant we keep with love.
One hand held out an apple while the other held
Earth from a kirkyard where the dead remember me.
Douglas Dunn, “The Apple Tree,” in New Selected Poems, 1964–2000 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 73.
17. “at the hither edge”: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; New York: Dover, 1996), p. 3.
18. “As they wrested their clearing”: ibid., p. 345.
19. “coarseness and strength”: ibid., p. 37.
20. “restless, nervous energy”: Jackson links restlessness to exuberance, as did Henry T. Buckle in his History of Civilization (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1869): “An exuberant and therefore a restless nation” (vol. III, pt. 1., p. 9).
21. “flush with enthusiasm”: quoted in Turner, Frontier, p. 319.
22. “From this hour I ordain myself”: Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” in Leaves of Grass (1855; New York: Norton, 1965), p. 151. Whitman, says Robert Louis Stevenson, “sees that, if the poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells us, are to be ‘hymns of the praise of things.’ They are to make for a certain high joy in living.” Robert Louis Stevenson, “Walt Whitman,” in The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. J. Treglown (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 75; essay first published in 1878.
23. “Here something was about to go wrong”: O. E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1999), p. 33; first published in the United States in 1927.
24. “This vast stretch”: ibid., p. 41.
25. “This formless prairie”: ibid., p. 43.
26. “Where Per Hansa was”: ibid., p. 257.
27. “Now it had taken possession”: ibid., pp. 48, 52–53.
28. “such a zest for everything”: ibid., p. 56.
29. “plow[s] and harrow[s]”: ibid.
30. “He was never at rest”: ibid., pp. 125, 127, 128.
31. “unchangeable—it was useless”: ibid., p. 149.
32. “called forth all that was evil”: ibid., p. 174.
33. “heeded not the light of the day”: ibid., p. 255.
34. “seemed to reflect”: ibid., p. 179.
35. “even louder in his optimism”: ibid., pp. 148–49.
36. “they would all become wild beasts”: ibid., p. 215.
37. “the power to create a new life”: ibid., p. 337.
38. “As the mild spring weather set in”: ibid., p. 338.
39. “He walked so lightly”: ibid., pp. 337–38.
40. “It was as if nothing affected people”: ibid., pp. 485–86.
41. Americans see enthusiasm: S. Sommers, “Adults Evaluating Their Emotions: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Emotion in Adult Development, ed. C. Z. Malatesta and C. E. Izard (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1984), pp. 319–38.
42. Optimism is a related and defining American trait: John Leland, “Why America Sees the Silver Lining,” New York Times, June 13, 2004.
43. high rates of manic-depressive illness: B. H. Roberts and J. K. Myers, “Religion, National Origin, Immigration, and Mental Illness,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 153: 418 (1988); B. Malzberg, “Mental Disease Among Native and Foreign-Born Whites in New York State, 1949–1951,” Mental Hygiene, 48: 478–99 (1964); L. Rowitz and L. Levy, “Ecological Analysis of Treated Mental Disorders in Chicago,” Archives of General Psychiatry, 19: 571–79 (1968).
44. “My ties and ballasts”: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass, p. 61. Whitman’s expansiveness found a match in that of his contemporary Melville: “Give me a condor’s quill!” he wrote. “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!” (Moby-Dick, p. 465).
45. “I began to feel that I lived”: Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis (1953; New York: Scribners, 2003), pp. 261–62.
46. he made an ironic exception: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” in The Crack-up with Other Pieces and Stories (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 29; essay first published in 1945.
47. “New York had all the iridescence”: ibid., p. 22.
48. “The buildings were higher”: ibid., p. 28.
49. “bloated, gutted, stupid with cake and circuses”: ibid., p. 29.
50. “a widespread neurosis”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack-up, p. 16; essay first published in 1931.
51. “Something bright and alien”: ibid., p. 17.
52. “We were somewhere in North Africa”: Fitzgerald, “My Lost City,” p. 29.
53. “had begun to disappear”: Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 16.
54. “I began to realize”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-up,” in The Crack-up, p. 42; essay first published in 1936.
55. “an over-extension of the flank”: ibid., p. 48.
56. “often approached such an ecstasy”: ibid., pp. 55–56.
57. “It’s not much fun”: letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, March 15, 1958, quoted in Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 253.
58. “It takes just a moment”: Robert Lowell, “Balloon,” in Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 987.
59. “In all the woods”: Anonymous, “The Flora of the Somme Battlefield,” Nature, 100: 475 (1918). An irrepressible scientific curiosity came through as well: “The innumerable shell-hole ponds present many interesting features to the biologist. In July they were half-full of water, and abounded in water beetles and other familiar pond creatures, with dragonflies flitting around.… [O]ften growing out of the water were stout plants … and water grasses.”
60. “It was the invisible and intangible spirit”: Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 745.
61. “London itself would rise again”: ibid., pp. 745–46.
62. “I could no longer take any pleasure”: Joyce Poole, Coming of Age with Elephants: A Memoir (New York: Hyperion, 1996), pp. 232–33.
63. “There were no roads here”: ibid., pp. 265–66.
64. “I admit that the slave does sometimes sing”: Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Slavery, No. 1,” delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, December 1, 1850, in Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. P. S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Y. Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), pp. 164–70.
65. “I sit down on the wire”: Philippe Petit, To Reach the Clouds: My High-Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers (New York: North Point Press, 2002), p. 194.
66. “gods of the billion constellations”: ibid., pp. 194–95.
67. Fight terror: Two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, The Economist harked back to the pioneering origins of America: “America’s response to the first sustained terrorist attack on its soil is balanced, level-headed and sensible.… The can-do pioneers who tamed a wild continent and then helped to win three world confrontations have not disappeared after all.” Lexington, “America the Sensible,” The Economist, October 27, 2001, p. 34.
68. “Let us print”: Petit, To Reach the Clouds, p. 241.
69. “our nation’s strength”: Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys (1974; New York: Bantam, 1989), p. 476.
70. “Man has always gone”: ibid., p. 487.
71. “inexorable motion of human beings”: Alan Bean, talk given at the National Museum of Naval Aviation, Pensacola, Fla., June 15, 2003. Bean’s comments are borne out by the level of public interest in space. A poll published by Britain’s ITN archive (the world’s largest collection of television news) revealed that Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk continued to be the most requested piece of film footage ever shown on television (“Moonwalk Footage Is Brits’ Favorite Clip,” Washington Post, September 3, 2003). In the first six weeks of 2004, NASA’s Mars websites registered more than 4.6 billion hits (“Space Sites Garner High Hits,” USA Today, February 17, 2004).
72. “I am alone now”: Collins, Carrying the Fire, pp. 408–9.
73. “As I scurry about”: ibid., p. 417.
74. a piece of lunar rock: “We have completed the rock section for the Washington Cathedral. This section is from Apollo 11 rock number 10057 and is specific piece number 230. Using the average radius, thickness, and the average specific gravity of lunar rocks, we have calculated the weight of this section to be 7.18 grams. The rock, collected by Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, is a basalt, probably from a lava flow. From isotopic analysis, we believe this rock to have crystallized approximately 3.6 billion years ago. The mineral pyroxferroite, unknown from Earth, was discovered in this rock.” Memo from TL/Acting Lunar Sample Curator to NASA Headquarters, June 10, 1974 (from the archives of Washington National Cathedral).
75. “Is not God”: “Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!” (Job 22:12).
76. “My life flows on”: Robert Lowry, “How Can I Keep from Singing,” in Bright Jewels for the Sunday School (New York: Bigelow & Main, 1869), p. 16.
Robert Louis Stevenson, in his prayer “For the Renewal of Joy”(from Vailima Prayers, reprinted in Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, Our Samoan Adventure, ed. Charles Neider [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955], p. 247), wrote:
Look down, call upon the dry bones, quicken, enliven; re-create in us the soul
of service, the Spirit of peace; renew in us the sense of joy.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the following individuals for generously agreeing to answer my questions about the role of exuberance in their lives: Dr. Samuel Barondes, the late J. Carter Brown, Dr. Andrew Cheng, Dr. Robert Farquhar, Dr. Carleton Gajdusek, Dr. Robert Gallo, Senator George McGovern, Katy Payne, Dr. Joyce Poole, Hope Ryden, Jean Schulz, Judy Sladky, Dr. James Watson, the late Senator Paul Wellstone, and Dr. Ellen Winner. Senator Wellstone died in an airplane accident in late 2002, before I was able to complete my follow-up interview with him. With regret, I decided that it would be best not to include his earlier, incomplete remarks in this book. Paul Wellstone was a magnificently exuberant man, and his contagious enthusiasm for life, ideas, and politics was of importance not only to those he represented in Minnesota but to the entire nation. He is greatly missed by those of us who were fortunate to work with him on mental health advocacy causes.
J. Carter Brown, for many years the director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., also died during the course of my writing this book. Because he had written out responses to my questions and we had, on many occasions and at great length, discussed the essential role of exuberance in his life, I felt comfortable including his observations here.
Several people were helpful to me while I was doing research for this book: Duncan Blanchard, atmospheric scientist and biographer of Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley; David Dugan, who provided me with useful information about Michael Faraday’s lectures at the Royal Institution; Dr. Ellen Gerrity, Senator Wellstone’s legislative assistant for mental health and addiction issues; Randi and Hart Johnson and Keith Charles, who were gracious when I visited St. Paul, Minnesota, for the Peanuts on Parade Festival; the Reverend Stuart Kenworthy of Christ Church, Georgetown; Marla Krauss, Special Collections Librarian for Vertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History in New York; Alain Moreau, for his initial and elegant art design for the chapter illustrations; Jinny Nathans, Archivist, American Meteorological Society in Boston, for information about Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley; Diane Ney, Records Manager, Washington National Cathedral, for providing me access to the correspondence between Richard Feller, Clerk of the Works, and Rodney Winfield, the artist who designed the Cathedral’s stained-glass Space Window; and Marian O’Keefe and the staff of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Financial support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has been generous and greatly appreciated.
Exuberance: The Passion for Life Page 41