The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  Could this G. Whitmore really be George Whitman? Walt packed a few clothes, notebooks, and fifty dollars in cash—his household’s entire cash reserves—and left for Washington. He was forty-seven years old. His life was about to change.

  Walt Whitman spent several desperate days searching for his brother in hospitals all over Washington, D. C. He finally located the very-much-alive—and apparently indestructible—George (who would go on to survive a full twenty Civil War battles). George had been wounded in one cheek, yes, but mildly so, and he had already returned to his regiment. Whitman found him resting comfortably in his tent at the winter encampment.

  The search for George had been productive in ways Walt Whitman had not anticipated. It gave him his first exposure to the suffering in Civil War hospitals. And it was during this time that he had his first taste of ministering to wounded and dying soldiers. He found himself drawn to the suffering of these young men, and he began to visit them—to do what he could to salve their torment. In a letter home, he described it:

  I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good, but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him: at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.

  Whitman began to visit the hospitals regularly, drawn by the possibility that he could do some good for “the boys.” This was not the result of any high-minded scheme to do good. He simply had allowed events to take their course—a character trait that had always been part of Whitman’s genius, and that he wrote about at length in Song of the Open Road. Whitman noticed what drew his interest—and then, footloose as he was, he allowed himself to go with it. Today we might call this “going with the flow.” The flexibility in Whitman’s personality allowed him to attune with surprising dexterity to a wholly new vocation. Careful attunement to dharma will demand that we reinvent ourselves periodically throughout life. Whitman, as it turned out, was a master at self-reinvention.

  Whitman’s own journals tell the story of one of his first patients: Private John Holmes. Holmes was a twenty-one-year-old soldier from Bridgewater, Massachusetts—a shoemaker by trade. He had seen action at the Battle of Antietam, where he managed to avoid being wounded. But he had nonetheless become victim of the biggest stealth killer of the war: diarrhea. The disease afflicted over half of all Union soldiers. It was a nightmare to suffer through, and for many Civil War soldiers it resulted in a slow, wasting death.

  Holmes had suffered a ghastly series of mistreatments at the hands of inept Union medical personnel, until he finally collapsed at Washington’s Campbell Hospital, where Whitman found him. Whitman was alarmed by “his glassy eyes, with a look of despair and hopelessness, sunk low in his thin, pallid-brown young face.”

  “I sat down by him without any fuss,” Whitman later wrote in his journal, “talked a little; soon saw that it did him good; led him to talk a little himself; got him somewhat interested; wrote a letter for him to his folks in Massachusetts … soothed him down as I saw he was getting a little too much agitated, and tears in his eyes; gave him some small gifts and told him I should come again soon.”

  Whitman began to see that his mere presence, his tenderness, his attention, had an enormous healing effect. He ministered faithfully to Holmes for weeks and Holmes eventually recovered his health completely and rejoined his unit. But as he left the hospital, John Holmes told Whitman that he believed without question that Whitman had saved his life.

  Whitman had found a new calling—a calling for which he didn’t even know he was searching. He described it to his brother Jeff: “I cannot give up my Hospitals yet,” he wrote. “I never before had my feelings so thoroughly and (so far) permanently absorbed, to the very roots, as by these huge swarms of dear, wounded, sick, dying boys.”

  As it turned out—and as is so often the case in these matters—his whole life had been a preparation for this dharma. It was a calling that used all of him—itinerant poet, nurse, surrogate father, mother, brother, angel. And being a poet by nature, Whitman soon found precise words for his new calling. He inscribed it on the front of the notebook he would carry throughout the rest of the war: “Walt Whitman, Soldier’s Missionary.”

  5

  Could our friend Katherine find the same flexibility within herself? In recent months, I had seen Katherine’s paralysis begin to break up. She had started to sniff around—thinking more actively about what might be next for her. Once she started to really pay attention to her dilemma, she realized that her Plan B—teaching English literature part-time, gardening, and caring for her cats—did not really light her up at all. Much as she might try to spice it up in her own mind, Plan B felt wan, empty, and a little pathetic. It did not have the hallmarks of dharma.

  Then, after almost two years of active listening and waiting—her version of Whitman’s slough of despond in New York City—Katherine got a whiff of something new, something vividly alive. She called me, excited.

  Out of the blue, Katherine had been asked to be the editor of a small and now-struggling journal of nature writing. It had once aimed to be one of the premier journals of great nature writing, and aspired to feature the blossoming Thoreaus and Burroughs of the times. But the journal had fallen on hard times. Katherine had been on their board for six years. (It was one thing that had really lit her up in the previous three years.) And then, quite without warning, an opening: The forty-five-year-old editor had left the journal smack in the middle of the recession. In difficult straits as they were, the journal couldn’t pay much. But they needed Katherine’s steady and already-trusted hand at the wheel. They had no reason to think she was available. They asked anyway.

  Here it was. The intersection of The Gift and The Times. This new work would use Katherine’s gifts for writing and editing. Her love of organic gardening. Her devotion to nature. Her concern about the future of the planet. And it cooked them all together into an entirely new stew that Katherine found thrilling. It was small. And it was very, very large.

  6

  Walt Whitman passionately adopted the garb of Soldier’s Missionary. He began to develop a routine—the essential infrastructure of any profession. He started, as he said, by “fortifying myself with previous rest, the bath, clean clothes, a good meal, and as cheerful an appearance as possible.” Before he sallied forth, he prepared a grab bag of treats, including candy, fruit, writing supplies, tobacco, socks, cookies, underwear. He would then set forth to the hospital wards and sessions of “visiting” that might last anywhere from two hours to four or five hours. He embraced his work with everything he had. “Behold,” he had written earlier in Leaves of Grass (as if foreshadowing his work in the hospitals), “I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.”

  There is no episode of Whitman’s nursing career more moving than his involvement with a young fifer named Erastus Haskell, who contracted typhoid fever while serving with the 141st New York. Whitman describes him as “a silent dark-skinn’d Spanish-looking youth, with large very dark blue eyes …”

  Doctors had pronounced Haskell’s case all but hopeless, and Whitman sat with him as much as he could during his final weeks. “Many nights I sat by in the hospital till far in the night—The lights would be put out—yet I would sit there silently, hours, late, perhaps fanning him—he always liked to have me sit there, but never cared to talk—I shall never forget those nights, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and wounded lying around in their cots, just visible in the darkness and this dear young man close at hand lying on what proved to be his death bed—I do not know his past life, but what I do know, and what I saw of him, he was a noble boy.”

  In a letter to Haskell’s parents after the young man’s death, Whitman reveals some of the deepest sources of his call:

  “I write you this letter, because I would do something at least in his memory—his fate was a hard one, to die so—He is one of th
e thousands of our unknown American men in the ranks about whom there is no record or fame, no fuss made about their dying so unknown, but I find in them the real precious and royal ones of this land, giving themselves up, aye even their young and precious lives, in their country’s cause …”

  Whitman gave his boys the gift of acknowledging the nobility of their sacrifice. He faced death with them.

  7

  By the fall of 1863, Whitman had begun to feel the strain of death and loss. He was increasingly distracted and emotional, and he wrote at length to his mother about his “heart-sickness.” Whitman had taken on the suffering of the times. He began to write poetry again as a way of coming to terms with this suffering. Now, his experience in the war spilled forth in a swell of words: newspaper articles, essays, poems.

  Whitman would later collect his war poems into a volume entitled Drum-Taps. He wanted, he said, “to express in a poem … the pending action of this Time and Land we swim in, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair and hope, the shiftings, masses, and the whirl and deafening din … the unprecedented anguish of wounded and suffering.”

  Through his writing, Whitman attempts to see into the soul of the soldier. He finds their souls to be immortal.

  I see behind each mask that wonder a kindred soul,

  O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend,

  Nor the bayonet stab what you really are;

  the Soul! Yourself I see, great as any, good as the best,

  Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill,

  Nor the bayonet stab O friend.

  Whitman gave no indication in his journal that he had studied the Bhagavad Gita. But in his poetry he declared over and over again the very same truth that Krishna taught to Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra: “Our bodies are known to end, but the embodied self is enduring, indestructible, and immeasurable … Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, waters do not wet it … it is enduring, all-pervasive, fixed, immovable, and timeless.”

  Like the ancient Seer, Whitman had seen through the mask of death. He became the witness—the gray-bearded Seer—for his generation, and for the world. He was a witness to the nobility of spirit that emerged in the center of cataclysm, of massacre, of war. Walt Whitman, Soldier’s Missionary, became the Krishna of the times—seeing the madness, speaking it, grieving wildly for the loss of precious life and innocence. He took on the task—a devouring task—of understanding the meaning of the war.

  By the end of the war, Whitman the poet seemed to be everywhere. He was at the front lines of the battle. He was in the hospital tents. He was there when the Grand Review happened at the end of the war—the great parade in Washington, D.C. that marched out the whole tattered lot of generals and enlisted men and wounded men and congressmen and secretaries of war. Whitman was there—Seer-like—near the platform that held all the dignitaries, and saw and described the actors—President Johnson (Lincoln had been assassinated just weeks before), the generals, the secretary of war. But he would always say that the rank and file were the ones who most drew his love, attention, and admiration.

  8

  Katherine’s friends were not thrilled with her anticipated reinvention of herself. They had imagined another future for her. They had assumed that she would be joining them for bridge, luncheons, and garden club. They had not imagined her going to work at a faltering magazine, meeting deadlines, carrying what seemed to them a great new burden. They pushed against it.

  “It’s true,” Katherine admitted to me in a moment of doubt. “The job is not perfect.” The work, after all, was tedious at times. Crazy hours. The future of the journal was entirely unknown. God knows it would probably always be shaky financially. Why on earth would she trade in a comfortable position in the big brick buildings of the school for an ancient farmhouse whose unpainted outbuildings were crumbling? This was a job for a much younger person.

  Her friends were alarmed. “It will use you up, Katherine.”

  But this carping was enough to push her to the other side of her ambivalence (ambivalence, it turns out, is an unavoidable companion in the search for a new dharma): “Well, what if it does?” she countered. “What else do I have to be used up by? My cats?”

  We in twenty-first-century America have strange dreams and fantasies about retirement. We imagine a life of leisure. The Golden Years. But what is this leisure in the service of?

  When we reach sixty-two, as Katherine had, we are likely to interpret feelings of exhaustion and boredom as the signal to retire. But couldn’t they just as easily be the call to reinvent ourselves? As we age it seems harder and harder to let our authentic dharma reinvent us. We imagine somehow that the risks are greater. We tend to think that leaping off cliffs is for the young. But no. Actually—when better to leap off cliffs? (T. S. Eliot said it: “Old men ought to be explorers.”)

  The fear of leaping is, of course, the fear of death. It is precisely the fear of being used up. And dharma does use us up, to be sure. But why not be used up giving everything we’ve got to the world? This is precisely what Krishna teaches Arjuna: You cannot hold on to your life. You don’t need to. You are immortal. “Our bodies are known to end, but the embodied self is enduring, indestructible, and immeasurable; therefore, Arjuna, fight the battle!”

  The Gift is not for its own sake. It is for the common good. It is for The Times.

  9

  At the end of the war it became Walt Whitman’s self-assigned duty to make sense of its unimaginable suffering—including Lincoln’s assassination, which came just days after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox. Right away, Whitman saw the meaning of the assassination—and he saw it in Krishnean terms: “He was assassinated—but the Union is not assassinated … The Nation is immortal.”

  Whitman began to work on an elegy to describe the meaning of the war. He called it, “Retrievements Out of the Night.” It was perhaps his greatest poem. It was written for all the bruised and broken young men. The poem was saturated with death:

  Come lovely and soothing death,

  Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,

  In the day, in the night, to all, to each,

  Sooner or later delicate death.

  Here were commingled the memories of the dead soldiers and their dead commander—the president. It was a triumph of a poem—written in the thrall of dharma. It was the last great poem of Whitman’s career.

  Whitman’s poetic genius could not be for himself alone. His deeper gifts revealed themselves when put in the service of the times and of the greatest need. Having been put in the service of humanity, his gift was ennobled, transformed. His words helped turn the dark wound of the Civil War into a kind of transcendent light. Whitman had developed an expansive consciousness that saw into the meaning of things. This is, after all, what a poet does. He had infused his poetic spirit into his “missionary” work in the hospitals. He had turned his life into a poem—a work of art—in the most unlikely of places: the Civil War hospital tent.

  We see here the themes that will occupy the rest of the book: Selflessness. Sacrifice. Surrender. Not just responsibility to The Gift itself, but responsibility to give it in the way that is called forth. Krishna says, “Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.”

  By the end of the war, Whitman was used up. The photographs of him before and after the war show him stunningly aged and transformed. Through his work in the hospital tents he gave himself away. But he also found himself.

  After the war, Whitman experienced a long, slow decline in health. He would never be the same. But he did not count the cost. “There were years in my life—years there in New York—when I wondered if all was not going to the bad with America—the tendency downwards—but the war saved me: what I s
aw in the war set me up for all time—the days in the hospitals.”

  The Civil War saved the Union. But it also saved Walt Whitman. It saved him from a life trapped in self. It called forth from him his highest, noblest vision of mankind—and in speaking this vision, he made it so. Like Thoreau, he had discovered the power of authentic words to change the world.

  Dharma is born mysteriously out of the intersection between The Gift and The Times. Dharma is a response to the urgent—though often hidden—need of the moment. Each of us feels some aspect of the world’s suffering acutely. It tears at our hearts. Others don’t see it or don’t care. But we feel it. And we must pay attention. We must act. This little corner of the world is ours to transform. This little corner of the world is ours to save.

  I was wandering aimlessly through an art gallery in New York City several years ago when I was stopped in my tracks by a stunning Japanese print. It was Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa—a stylized print of a mammoth and looming wave framing a distant mountain. I vaguely remembered studying this picture in a college art course. Wasn’t there something about the “innovative artistic tension-arc” created by the moving wave in the foreground and the small-but-unmoving presence of the mountain anchoring the distance? Yes, I could see it now. More than that, I could feel it. In person—at midlife—the print had an energy and power of which I had been oblivious as a college sophomore.

  Even more than the print itself, however, I was captivated by the artist’s words about his work—posted on a small ivory card next to the print: “From around the age of six,” the artist began, “I had the habit of sketching from life.” He continues: