Suddenly I broke out in a drenching sweat. My clothes were soaked through within seconds. I was panic-stricken, in the grip of a powerful anxiety attack. But why at this instant of airborne elation? It took a while to figure it out.
All my life I had pursued clear goals: in high school, to get into a good college; in college, to get into medical school; in medical school, to become a writer; as a writer, to make a movie.
I was thirty years old. I had graduated from Harvard, taught at Cambridge University, climbed the Great Pyramid, earned a medical degree, married and divorced, been a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, published two bestselling novels, and now had made a movie. And I had abruptly run out of goals for myself.
I was stranded within my own life. That was why I broke into a sweat: what was I going to do now?
I had no idea.
In the following weeks, I fell into a lethargy, then a full-blown depression. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Needless to say, sympathy for my condition was in short supply. To be depressed by success was not attractive, or even understandable. My friends didn’t realize that they might be next in line.
I took to haunting bookstores, buying five hundred dollars’ worth of books at a time, carrying them off in cartons. Books on every conceivable subject: dinosaurs, hot-air ballooning, Charles II, saturation diving, Islamic art, weather forecasting, computer graphics, Indonesian cooking, criminology, Benjamin Franklin, the Himalaya, Victorian cities, high-energy physics, tigers, Leonardo da Vinci, the British Raj, witchcraft, vegetarian cooking, the Inca Empire, Winslow Homer. Since nothing interested me, everything was equally uninteresting.
One day I came across a book called Be Here Now. It was an esoteric, quasi-religious Eastern-philosophy book of the sort I didn’t usually look at, but it had a handmade quality and an odd shape that caught my eye. The author was Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert, an expelled professor of psychology at Harvard. I had been a reporter on the Harvard Crimson during the sixties when Alpert and his colleague Timothy Leary were thrown off the faculty for giving LSD to undergraduates. I remembered those incidents well. Now here was his book.
I took it home and read it. The book was in three sections. The first section contained straightforward prose; the second section consisted of hand-printed words and pictures, a kind of messy collage; the third section was a guide to meditation.
I read the first section. I expected to find the disorganized ramblings of a poor fellow whose brains had been scrambled by too much acid and too many mystical journeys that went nowhere. But instead I found a lucid history of a driven, successful East Coast intellectual who suddenly found his life, his houses, his cars, his lovers, his vacations, his work, to be unsatisfying.
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
I felt exactly the same way.
Richard Alpert, a Harvard renegade, an obviously unbalanced man who had gone off the deep end of his life, now appeared before me as somebody I identified with strongly. I had a juggling act to do, to make it all right for me to agree with him. Richard Alpert must have something on the ball after all.
But there was a further implication. Alpert, now Ram Dass—the new name stuck in my throat—I didn’t even want to say it—Ram Dass had gone to India. And after several years he had come back with answers that seemed to work for him. He seemed to feel better about things, to have found a new perspective.
He had made a pilgrimage to India.
Should I?
I couldn’t stand the idea of it. The implications of it. I couldn’t see myself as a holy seeker after truth. Wearing white robes, contemplating my navel. I still shopped at Brooks Brothers. I still liked Brooks Brothers.
There had to be another way.
My attitude toward mystical journeys was typified by the joke about the student who seeks the holy man in India, finds him meditating at the top of a mountain, and asks breathlessly, “What is the meaning of life?”
The holy man says, “Life is a flower.”
The student is outraged: “Life is a flower?”
To which the holy man replies, “You mean it’s not?”
That was my idea: nobody knew any more than I did. Not really. A professor might know more about his particular subject, and the resident of a city might know more about that city, but as far as reality was concerned, nobody knew any more than I did. I figured I knew all there was to know.
What I knew was that the history of man demonstrated the inexorable triumph of reason over superstition, culminating in our acceptance of science as the best method for learning the truth and exploring the universe. That in the past men had believed all sorts of nonsense, but through the fruits of science we were able to roll back the darkness and live in the light of reason.
This meant that, however bad life might be now, it could only have been worse in past ages. The history I envisioned was a history of steady progress. Nothing was lost, only gained. In no way were the people of, say, the Middle Ages better off than I was. That was inconceivable. Medieval people were suffocated by their social structure, impoverished by their economy, and driven by their religion to make those idiotic (if beautiful) cathedrals.
I lived in a fast-paced scientific world, where technical journals were removed from the library after five years. In general, I preferred to look forward. We lived in an exciting time, in which we were learning the nature of reality at the subatomic level, the nature of the universe, and the nature of life. I was living in the most enlightened, the richest, the most advanced, the most liberated period in the history of man.
And I knew that, despite fame, fortune, and psychiatry bills, I was miserable.
And it seemed Ram Dass was not.
I reread his book several times, trying to find another way, my own way, in his story. Each time I read the book, what Alpert was saying seemed to make more sense. It became more straightforward. It became more clearly a better way to behave, a better way to look at things.
But I still wasn’t about to give up my life and go to India.
What I did was, I read books. There was a bookstore called the Bodhi Tree that specialized in these esoteric areas. I went there a lot, and pretty soon names like Krishnamurti and Yogananda were as familiar to me as Watson and Crick, or Hubel and Wiesel. And I went a lot to Maui.
In the early seventies, Maui was a wonderful place. You could go diving and listen to the mysterious underwater songs of the humpback whales. You could hike into lush hidden valleys without being shot by dope growers. In two hours, you could go from the beach to the freezing summit of Haleakala, ten thousand feet above sea level. Inside the crater of Haleakala there were at least three distinct environments: cinder-cone desert, alpine meadow, and tropical rain forest. The silence inside the crater, the unworldly appearance of the landscape, made it especially impressive.
In those days, Maui wasn’t crowded; they hadn’t built those monstrous hotels that appear to have been designed by Walt Disney and Albert Speer. Lahaina was a sleepy, run-down little town populated by hippies; the bookstores were stocked with “spiritual” books. I hadn’t seen most of these books before. I first read the Seth books there, and Carlos Castaneda, and Ken Wilbur. I read all sorts of books there for the first time.
The other thing that I did was, I began to travel again.
Bangkok
I had traveled before. I had traveled all my life. My parents were inveterate travelers, and they took their kids with them. They’d cram all of us into the car each June when school was over, and we’d head off for some faraway destination. The Southwest and Mexico, one year. The Pacific Northwest, one year. The Canadian Rockies, one year.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had been to forty-eight states, to Canada and Mexico, and to five countries of Europe.
After college I won a Henry Russell Shaw Fellowship, and for a year traveled in Europe and North Africa. That was in 1965. A year of travel, what an opportunity—and as a student I was obsessively thorough. I entered
the museums of Paris and Amsterdam loaded down with guidebooks and commentaries. If I was in a city where an important museum was closed, I stayed an extra day. I saw everything. I ate everything. I experienced everything. In Egypt, I climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops, went inside it, and then visited every archaeological site of importance between Saqqara and Aswan. Nothing was too small or too distant to escape my inspection; it was never too hot or too buggy; if there was any question about it, I saw it. In Madrid, I sought out obscure apartment buildings that represented the early work of Antonio Gaudí; in France, I went down a checklist of buildings by Le Corbusier. I fought the traffic of Naples in search of Caravaggios. In France and Spain, I visited every prehistoric painted cave known. I developed an interest in Romanesque cloisters. In Greece, I spent two weeks in the Peloponnese alone, looking at classical sites outlined by the Guide Bleu. I used the Guide Bleu because it was the most detailed guide I could find, and I preferred it even though I was obliged to struggle through the site descriptions in my bad French.
So, by the time I started medical school, I could say of all North America, Europe, and North Africa, “I’ve been there.” I knew my way around. I was comfortable with different languages, different currencies. My passport and luggage were suitably battered. I could enter a strange city, find a hotel, speak enough of the language to get along, to be at ease.
I was an accomplished traveler.
The financial pressures of medical school prevented much traveling during those years. And afterward I fell out of the habit. I didn’t have much curiosity about other places any more. I was pursuing my career, getting on with my life. Eventually, I realized it had been almost a decade since I’d taken a real trip.
When I hit my doldrums, I decided I had better get moving. I decided to go to Bangkok, where my friend Davis Pike had urged me to visit him. I booked a flight, cabled Davis that I was coming, and set off. My first stop was Hong Kong.
There are few sights as exciting as landing in Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong at night. The mountains, the water, the lights of the buildings make it magical, like flying into the center of a glowing jewel. I was tremendously excited as I looked out the window. And then to step off the plane and be assailed by the smells—that peculiarly Asian combination of sea water, dried fish, packed humanity—my excitement increased tenfold. And driving in a taxi through the city, past the open, brightly lit stalls, people squatting on the pavement, working, all the street life—fantastic! I had never seen anything like this!
I arrived at the Peninsula Hotel, and it appeared to me the grandest in the world. There was nothing in Europe like this. Everything was subtly different. There were white-liveried people on every floor to help you. The rooms were sumptuous. And in the elegant marble bathroom there was a carafe of drinking water, and a little sign saying that you shouldn’t drink the tap water. Fabulous! Exotic! This combination of expensive marble and the little sign! Europe had nothing like this!
I went to sleep blissfully happy.
I awoke the next day ready to see Asia. Guidebook in hand, I walked the streets of Kowloon, then took the Star Ferry to Victoria. I wandered, enjoying all the street activity. Then I went to the Central Market, thinking markets are always good to look at, a good orientation to how people live. I’d always enjoyed seeing the markets in rural France and North Africa.
The Central Market was a two-story open concrete structure with tiled surfaces. The place smelled like a morgue. They were slaughtering chickens and small animals right on the street. I saw one man slice open a pig’s intestines on the sidewalk, and sluice out the ruffled inner surface with a garden hose.
Suddenly I was exhausted. I had to go lie down. It was jet lag, catching up with me. I returned to my hotel and slept several hours.
That afternoon I took a taxi to Aberdeen, on the other side of Victoria. In those days Aberdeen was a spectacular place, a giant boat basin where thousands of people lived. I hired a boat and went for a tour of the basin. It was terrific to see the vignettes of life on the boats. I was excited again. Afterward I went to the onshore market in Aberdeen, where the boat people purchased their food.
The Chinese place great importance on fresh food. I would often see a Chinese woman carrying a plastic bag filled with water, with a live fish swimming inside it; this, I was told, was her family’s dinner, kept fresh to the last minute.
The Aberdeen market was under dark-green tents, very extensive, very crowded. I got the kind of stares and jokes that I always get in Asia because of my height, but the Chinese are cheerful; I enjoyed the whole thing. I looked at the freshness and variety of the vegetables; I looked at the clothing and other things for sale. I came, with some trepidation, to the meat section. But I was psychologically prepared; the Aberdeen market did not upset me. I moved through to the section where they sold fish, men shouting the freshness and quality of their wares. One man had filleted his fish, about a dozen of them set in a sloping incline in front of him. Each fish had a red spot on it. The red spot pulsed. I couldn’t imagine what that was. I looked more closely.
He had filleted each fish with such skill that he had left the hearts intact. These exposed fish hearts were now beating, as a kind of visual display, and as a proof that his fish were fresh. I was looking at a dozen beating fish hearts.
I had to go lie down.
Soon I fell into a pattern of exploration punctuated by some sight that would leave me unexpectedly exhausted, driving me back to my room to recuperate. But it was humiliating, in a way. I was an accomplished traveler. These little experiences shouldn’t bother me. Why was I getting so upset?
I was sure it must be jet lag. But whatever the reason, my symptoms got worse.
Some American girls picked me up and took me to a big Chinese dinner. The dinner was pleasant but extremely strange. The first course was shrimps. Little shrimps. We all peeled the shells with our hands, and ate the shrimps. Then the second course came. We all dumped the shells on the tablecloth next to our plates, to make room for the next course. And that’s where the shells stayed, in a little pile next to each diner, for the rest of the evening.
Then there was toasting. The Chinese love to drink healths, and a dinner is continually interrupted by this routine. But I saw that everyone was drinking with one hand holding the glass, and one finger from the other hand touching the bottom of the glass. I asked an Australian woman seated next to me, Why does everyone do this? She said, You have to drink a toast holding the glass with two hands, but a single finger from the other hand suffices.
More courses. They kept coming for hours. You got accustomed to having something put in the center of the table, picking at it for a while, and then getting something else.
At one point, a cooked fish, one of many, was placed in the center of the table. I was talking with someone, and I looked back—the fish was gone! Picked clean. Yet it had only been there a few seconds. What happened to that fish? I asked. That fish is a great delicacy, I was told. Everyone appreciates that fish. That fish costs four hundred dollars.
Having missed this fish, I was alerted. I immediately made a stab with my chopsticks at each new thing put on the table. Pretty soon there was another fish everyone liked. In a few moments the top was picked clean. Now we were looking at the backbone, and the flesh beneath. It seemed a simple matter to flip the fish over or to remove the backbone, but nobody at the table was doing this. The fish just lay there, half eaten.
Finally I couldn’t stand it. I said, “May I turn the fish?”
“I don’t know,” said the Australian woman next to me.
“I mean,” I said, “is it acceptable to turn the fish?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then why isn’t anyone doing it?” I asked.
“Well, because of how they came here, I expect.”
“How they came here?”
“And how they’ll go home, of course.”
I didn’t understand. We seemed to have drifted from the primary question of
the fish. I said, “Then it’s all right for me to turn the fish?”
“How will you be going home?” she asked.
“The same way I came here, in a taxi, I imagine.”
“But won’t you cross over water when you go home?”
“Yes …” We had taken a little boat to come to this restaurant.
“Then you can’t turn the fish,” she said. And she explained that if you were going to cross water after your meal, you couldn’t turn the fish.
“Perhaps if I just remove the backbone?” I asked hopefully.
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
Then she said something quickly in Chinese, and a waiter came over and flipped the fish. And everyone started to eat again.
“He lives here,” the woman explained, nodding to the waiter.
So it went on like that, with all of us sitting next to our piles of shrimp shells, drinking toasts with our fingers on the bottoms of the glasses, and nobody able to flip the fish. You never knew what would happen next. Finally, at the end of the evening, the guest of honor, an elderly man who was a Chinese movie star, gave a martial-arts demonstration. He flung his body around the room, quick, agile, graceful, strong. He was sixty-seven years old.
I thought, There’s a lot I don’t know about.
When I landed in Bangkok, I was met by my friend Davis, who had lived in Thailand for five years. “What were you doing in Hong Kong? It’s so boring there, completely Western. Not the real Asia at all. You’ll have a much more interesting time here.”
Driving back from the airport, Davis gave me essential advice for getting along in Bangkok. “There are four rules you must never break while you are in Thailand,” he said. “First, if you are in a temple, never climb on a statue of Buddha.”
“Okay.”
“Second, always keep your head lower than the head of a Buddha statue.”
“Okay.”
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