his resistance to Johanna`s request was wavering. Slowly there swiveled into mind an
inspired plan that would serve two purposes; his wife would be pleased, and the dilemma
of Arthur`s future would be resolved.
His decision was to offer his fifteen–year–old son a choice. «You must choose,” he
told him. «Either accompany your parents on a year`s grand tour of all of Europe or
pursue a career as a scholar. Either you give me a pledge that on the day you return from
the journey you will begin your business apprenticeshipor forego this journey, remain in
Hamburg, and immediately transfer to a classical educational curriculum which will
prepare you for the academic life.»
Imagine a fifteen–year–old facing such a life–altering decision. Perhaps the ever–pedantic Heinrich was offering existential instruction. Perhaps he was teaching his son
that alternatives exclude, that for every yes there must be a no. (Indeed, years later Arthur
was to write, «He who would be everything cannot be anything.»)
Or was Heinrich exposing his son to a foretaste of renunciation, that is, if Arthur
could not renounce the pleasure of the journey, how could he expect himself to renounce
worldly pleasures and live the impecunious life of a scholar?
Perhaps we are being too charitable to Heinrich. Most likely his offer was
disingenuous because he knew that Arthur would not, could not, refuse the trip. No
fifteen–year–old could do that in 1803. At that time such a journey was a priceless once–in–a–lifetime event granted only to a privileged few. Before the days of photography,
foreign places were known only through sketches, paintings, and published travel
journals (a genre, incidentally, that Johanna Schopenhauer was later to exploit
brilliantly).
Did Arthur feel he was selling his soul? Was he tormented by his decision? Of
these matters history is silent. We know only that in 1803, in his fifteenth year, he set off
with his father, mother, and a servant on a journey of fifteen months throughout all of
western Europe and Great Britain. Adele, his six–year–old sister, was deposited with a
relative in Hamburg.
Arthur recorded many impressions in his travel journals written, as his parents
required, in the language of the country visited. His linguistic aptitude was prodigious;
the fifteen–year–old Arthur was fluent in German, French, and English and had working
knowledge of Italian and Spanish. Ultimately, he was to master a dozen modern and
ancient languages, and it was his habit, as visitors to his memorial library have noted, to
write his marginal notes in the language of each text.
Arthur`s travel journals offer a subtle prefiguring of interests and traits which were
aggregating into a persistent character structure. A powerful subtext in the journals is his
fascination with the horrors of humanity. In exquisite detail Arthur describes such
arresting sights as starving beggars in Westphalia, the masses running in panic from the
impending war (the Napoleonic campaigns were incubating), thieves, pickpockets, and
drunken crowds in London, marauding gangs in Poitiers, the public guillotine on display
in Paris, the six thousand galley slaves, on view as in a zoo, in Toulon doomed to be
chained together for life in landlocked naval hulks too decrepit to put out to sea ever
again. And he described the fortress in Marseilles, which once housed the Man in the Iron
Mask, and the black death museum, where letters from quarantined sections of the city
were once required to be dipped into vats of hot vinegar before being passed on. And, in
Lyon, he remarked on the sight of people walking indifferently over the very spot where
their fathers and brothers were killed during the French Revolution.
At a boarding school in Wimbledon where Lord Nelson had once been a student in
England, Arthur perfected his English and attended public executions and naval
floggings, visited hospitals and asylums, and walked by himself through the massive
teeming slums of London.
The Buddha as a young man lived in his father`s palace, where the common lot of
mankind had been veiled from him. It was only when he first journeyed outside of his
father`s palace that he saw the three primal horrors of life: a diseased person, a decrepit
old man, and a corpse. His discovery of the tragic and terrible nature of existence led the
Buddha to his renunciation of the world and the search for a relief from universal
suffering.
For Arthur Schopenhauer, too, early views of suffering profoundly influenced his
life and work. The similarity of his experience to that of the Buddha was not lost on him,
and years later, when writing about his journey, he said, «In my seventeenth year, without
any learned school education, I was gripped by the misery of life, just like Buddha in his
youth, when he saw sickness, pain, aging, and death.»
Arthur never had a religious phase; he had no faith but, when young, had a will to
faith, a wish to escape the terror of a totally unobserved existence. Had he a belief in the
existence of God, though, it would have been sorely tested by his teenaged tour of the
horrors of European civilization. At the age of eighteen he wrote, «This world is
supposed to have been made by a God? No, much better by a devil!»
13
_________________________
When,at the end of their
lives, most men look back they
will find that they have lived
throughout ad interim. They
will be surprised to see that
the very thing they allowed to
slip by unappreciated and
unenjoyed was just their life.
And so a man, having been
duped by hope, dances into the
arms of death.
_________________________
The trouble with a kitten is that
Eventually it becomes a cat.
The trouble with a kitten is that
Eventually it becomes a cat.
Jerking his head to dislodge the annoying couplet from his mind, Julius sat up in bed and
opened his eyes. It was 6A.M. , a week later, the day of the next group meeting, and those
odd Ogden Nash lines looping around in his mind had been the background music for yet
another night of unsatisfying sleep.
Though everyone agrees that life is one goddamned loss after another, few know
that one of the most aggravating losses awaiting us in later decades is that of a good
night`s sleep. Julius knew that lesson all too well. His typical night consisted of tissue–thin dozing which almost never entered the realm of deep, blessed delta–wave slumber, a
sleep that was interrupted by so many awakenings that he often dreaded going to bed.
Like most insomniacs, he awoke in the morning believing either that he had slept far
