Man in the Empty Boat Read online

  Four

  A FINE DESCRIPTION OF WHAT my brother felt that day appears in the glossary of a European existentialist website. It shows up there as a definition for the word anguish. I’m not an existentialist; I found the website by accident. I had typed in the search words “French” and “mysterious,” but instead of getting photos of Isabelle Adjani, I ended up in a philosophy chat room.

  Anguish: a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility; the inherent insecurity we feel over the consequences of our actions.

  Anytime we are faced with an important decision, where the stakes are high, where we cannot be certain of the outcome, and where the consequences of making a poor choice may be catastrophic, we experience anxiety. That’s a healthy sign; people who experience no anxiety at all under those circumstances usually turn out to be dangerous. In some of us, however, the anxiety doesn’t know when to quit. It becomes like a software virus that replicates itself endlessly, until even the most trivial decisions and challenges of everyday life come to seem like insoluble problems. Chronic anxiety turns the journey of life into a treadmill of worry and wasted effort, and once you find yourself on that treadmill, it’s hard to get off.

  This is where the phrase “have a little faith” would seem to apply, but if Godless Universe 4.0 is your operating system, your hard drive will reject most faith-based programs, and there are times when that can seem like a major disadvantage.

  My parents had been raised as Baptists. Their parents were members of the same congregation, and that’s where my mother and father first met as children. Apparently, the “good news” didn’t make a lasting impression on the younger generation, however. By the time I was born, my parents were of one mind: They didn’t want their own children to have anything to do with religion, organized or not. My siblings and I grew up learning more about Greek mythology than we did about Christianity, and we learned absolutely nothing about any of the world’s other religions. I thought that churches were historical artifacts, like the Acropolis or the ruins of Machu Picchu, and it came as a real surprise to me to learn that many Americans—some of our neighbors, even!—actually believed what was preached in them.

  I knew a few kids in school who attended something called catechism, but they seemed embarrassed by the whole thing and never spoke of it except to say that it was boring. I assumed it was like a Cub Scouts meeting, which I had tried once, and that was boring enough. None of my peers ever talked about religion, either in the classroom or on the playground, except to spread rumors that one boy in our grade, Alan Pitter, was Jewish. All that meant to me was that Alan’s ancestors had worked on the pyramids, a fact that I’d learned not from reading the Bible but from watching Charlton Heston part the Red Sea.

  When I finally did get old enough to ask questions about religion, my parents acknowledged that faith must serve a purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t be so widespread and it wouldn’t have been around for so long. For many people, it clearly provides reassurance in a dangerous, uncertain world. But faith only works if you believe in it; once doubt sets in, you have to start looking elsewhere for comfort. Art was where my parents looked for a sense of meaning and reassurance, and although the results were only fair to middling, I followed their example.

  Five

  WHEN I WAS A KID, my favorite character in The Wizard of Oz was the Cowardly Lion. I liked him because I could relate to his problems more easily than to any of the other characters’ problems. I didn’t live on a dreary farm, I could read at my grade level so I knew I had a brain, and I cried when I shot a bird with my BB gun, so I knew I had a heart. But the Lion, who hates himself for being afraid of his own shadow, won me over the moment he sang:

  I’m afraid there’s no denyin’

  I’m just a dandy-lion

  A fate I don’t deserve.

  He hadn’t chosen to be cowardly; it was the hand he was dealt, and he didn’t like it one bit. He knew that there was something fundamentally unacceptable about being a lion with no self-confidence. He also knew that until he had straightened this problem out, he could never know peace; he could never feel at home in his own life. He would be a failure until he had proven—to himself and to everyone else—that if he ever met an elephant, he would wrap him up and sell-aphant. He had tried the positive-thinking approach: Act brave and you will become brave! Believe in yourself! Roar like you mean it! But we all know how that worked out. All it took was a slap on the nose from a little girl, and the illusion fell apart.

  My mother stood less than five feet tall, and I started school when I was four, so I was always the shortest and youngest boy in my grade. I couldn’t compete with any of the other boys in sports, my voice was as high as any of the girls’, and beginning at age seven, I was a cellist in the school orchestra. (I chose the cello after my mother took me to hear Aldo Parisot give a recital, and I fell in love with the sight of the wood grain on the back of his instrument.) I was a little twerp, in other words, but I hadn’t chosen to be a little twerp. It was the hand I was dealt, and I wanted a better one.

  No amount of reassurance from my parents or viewings of A Charlie Brown Christmas could dissuade me from the belief that there was something fundamentally unacceptable about my low position in the pecking order. But if I wanted things to change, I knew it was up to me to do something about it. I couldn’t pray for a growth spurt, and my parents couldn’t make my voice change. I was a perfect candidate for conversion to a philosophy of humanistic self-determination, so it should come as no surprise when I tell you that in 1973, when I saw the character played by David Carradine on the television show Kung Fu for the first time, I felt the way the apostles must have felt when they first met Jesus.

  Kwai Chang Caine, as portrayed by Mr. Carradine, was someone who had eradicated all traces of insecurity from his central nervous system. He’d also learned how to walk through walls, ignore pain, and kick pistols out of men’s hands when the need arose. And he played the flute, if you can believe it. He was every little twerp’s fantasy come to life.

  He hadn’t been born with all that wisdom and self-confidence. He’d acquired it at a place called the Shaolin temple, a Zen Buddhist monastery in northern China, and going there became my goal. The Shaolin temple wasn’t accepting exchange students from American junior high schools that year, however, so I had to make do. I burned a lot of incense in the basement, wore a bald-head wig when I meditated so as to look like an authentic Buddhist monk, and walked barefoot to school every day, in the winter in Connecticut, to try to overcome pain. My mother heard about this and made me promise to wear shoes, and I did, but only after having cut the soles out of the bottoms. Be glad I wasn’t your kid, that’s all I can say.

  I took kung fu lessons from the only teacher I could find in southwestern Connecticut, a man in need of anger-management counseling whose favorite maxim was “You can’t walk in peace ’til you’ve walked through violence first.” So as not to waste any time, he focused exclusively on the violence part.

  His studio was a thirty-minute drive from our home. My parents took turns driving me, and sometimes my dad chose to stay during the lesson rather than to drive home. He sat in the waiting room and worked on needlepoint art to pass the time.

  The master, exasperated by the lack of aggressive instinct I displayed when it came time to fight, gave me the nickname “candy-ass” and seemed to think that ridiculing me would cure me of my deficit. I convinced myself that his cruelty was some sort of test, an ordeal that he was putting me through in order to strengthen me and prepare me for the ultimate battle: the battle to conquer myself. So I sucked it up and let him humiliate me. In the meantime, I looked up Buddhism and Taoism in The World Book Encyclopedia, and this is the message that I took from there: Life sucks and then you die—unless you’re enlightened. If you’re enlightened, life sucks and then you die—but that’s OK.

  Enlightenment, apparently, is a highly evolved state of consciousness. If you can achieve it, all
of your problems will be solved at once, in a blinding flash, and they will stay solved forever. From that moment on, no matter where you are or what happens to you, you will be at peace. Your mind will be cleared of impure, negative, painful thoughts. Your mind will be like a mirror, and your thoughts will be like images in that mirror that come and go freely, leaving no stain on its surface. Your false, painful identity as a selfish ego will be swept away, and your true identity as an expansive, accepting, compassionate Buddha will be revealed. You will become both desireless and fearless, and in doing so, you will become free of all suffering.

  There was no mention of God in those entries, or any need for superhuman strength or wisdom. Suffering was an entirely man-made problem, and its solution could be achieved through human effort alone. All you had to do was meditate! To become enlightened, you didn’t have to cram more facts and figures into your head. Quite the opposite—spiritual awakening was a process of clearing bothersome facts and figures away until there was only native, natural wisdom left. You had to let your mind relax and go quiet until it became as clear as the blue sky.

  Hallelujah! My new philosophy gave me an ironclad excuse not to learn. I was sick of school anyway, so I told my parents that I had decided to become a Zen Buddhist. To help them understand my decision, I read them a passage from the Tao Te Ching, a sixth century BCE Taoist classic (not quite Buddhist, but close enough) that described the enlightened sages of old as follows:

  Watchful, like men crossing a winter stream.

  Alert, like men aware of danger.

  Courteous, like visiting guests.

  Yielding, like ice about to melt.

  Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood.

  Hollow, like caves.

  Opaque, like muddy pools.

  My mother couldn’t find anything objectionable in this passage, so she gave me her blessing. My father nodded sadly and said, “My son, the block of wood. Let me know if it works.”

  I became obsessed with the goal of attaining enlightenment, and when I get obsessed with something, I do so in the clinical sense. I meditated on the school bus, in homeroom, during study hall and lunch, in the basement at home, in the backyard, on the couch in the living room, and in my bed. I even tried to meditate while I was watching TV. Whenever I caught myself not meditating, I pinched myself, stuck safety pins into my legs, or held matches near my arms. I hid the damage with long-sleeved shirts. There was no time to waste, the Buddha said. Work out your salvation with diligence.

  Diligence was my specialty. Insecure teenagers tend to have lots of energy, and video games hadn’t been invented yet, so I had few distractions. Unfortunately, when it comes to spiritual quests, it turns out that diligence can work against you. You have to extinguish your ego to become enlightened, it’s true, but here’s the paradox: Whenever you strive toward any goal, including the goal of extinguishing your ego, you end up giving your ego a workout. So the harder you try to become egoless, the more egotistical you become. Welcome to Paradox World, the theme park that you can never leave, because you carry it around with you!

  The goal of attaining enlightenment through effort of any kind, when you get right down to it, is probably self-defeating. Yet for a lucky few, the effort leads to an indefinably satisfying experience. Just hang in there, the books said. Find a good teacher and do your best! Zen masters were in short supply in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1973, so for me it all boiled down to Do your best.

  On paper, it sounds simple enough: Do your best. We hear that message every day of our lives. In this world, if you want something badly enough and are willing to push yourself to the limits of endurance and imagination to achieve it, you’ll surely succeed. It may take a lifetime, but if you never give up, you’ll cross the finish line someday. In actual practice, however, the goal of doing your best can turn out to be as unattainable as reaching the spot where a rainbow touches the ground. The goal always recedes; the gap between who you actually are and who you hope to become never seems to close.

  Wise people adjust their expectations under these conditions. They stop comparing themselves to Buddha or Batman and trust themselves to achieve their personal best. Not me; I was not going to capitulate. Capitulation meant accepting that I might spend my whole life waiting for a better life to begin, and that was unacceptable. I was not going to be a quitter.

  I dug in for the long haul. I stuck with the meditation and the kung fu all through junior high and then high school, where I received permission to study Chinese as an independent study project. The art teacher let me practice Chinese calligraphy on my own during his class, and the gym coaches let me practice kung fu in a corner of the basketball court rather than forcing me to shoot hoops or run track. A tenth-grade history teacher saw how passionate I was about all this, and he offered to help. He happened to be taking a graduate course in Chinese history at the time, so he shared all of his books with me and basically let me take the course with him. I was so deeply absorbed in my own little world, and so disconnected from the world my peers inhabited, that I doubt anyone noticed when I disappeared after my junior year. I applied to Yale University a year early and was accepted, but instead of matriculating right away, I took a year off and worked in an office mail room to save money for tuition.

  At Yale, I majored in Chinese language and literature with a focus on the Buddhist and Taoist classics. I’d been reading those books in English translation for years, but the transformative miracle of enlightenment had not yet occurred. If I could read them in the original language, I thought, I might at last grasp their meaning directly.

  Five years later, when I could read those books in the original language, I discovered that the translations I’d been reading were pretty accurate. Language wasn’t the problem.

  In 1982, I applied for a job to teach English at a medical college in mainland China for two years. When I got there, I made it my goal to study with as many kung fu masters as I could find. I stopped reading philosophy books and put all of my efforts into the physical challenge of learning as many traditional martial arts systems as possible. I thought of it as kung fu graduate school. I came back home ready to launch a career as a martial arts instructor, but then something unexpected happened. My back went out.

  It didn’t just go out once. It went out once every three months at first, then every other month, then every month, and when it went out, it was so bad that I could hardly move. Just breathing was exruciating, and getting up to use the bathroom became a twenty-minute ordeal. I consulted orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, and acupuncturists. I tried yoga and biofeedback exercises, and I practiced tai chi every day, but nothing helped. On most days I couldn’t even put my shoes on by myself. Needless to say, I knew there was something fundamentally unacceptable about being a martial arts guy who can’t put on his own shoes.

  And I hadn’t become enlightened. Whenever my back went out, I became frustrated to the point of despair. Kwai Chang Caine wouldn’t have let a bad back get to him; he would have seen it as an opportunity to be mindful of his posture. I had spent sixteen years trying to achieve peace of mind through Eastern spirituality, but instead of turning me into a block of wood, my efforts turned me into someone who might have been raised by Chinese rabbits.

  In hindsight, I think I know why it didn’t work. Here is a story from the Zhuangzi, a Taoist classic written in China around twenty-three centuries ago:

  If a man in a boat is crossing a river and an empty boat drifts along and bumps into his, he won’t get angry. But if there is someone in the other boat, then the man will shout out directions to move. If his directions go unheeded, he will shout again, and then a third time, followed by a stream of curse words.

  If a man could make himself empty, and pass like that through the world, then who could harm him?

  It’s a wonderful allegory, but it brings us right back to Paradox World: The harder you try to make yourself empty, the more full of yourself you become. If selflessness comes, it must come by s
ome other means than one’s own desire to be selfless. I ran out of steam before I could find out what those other means were. Instead, I discovered writing, and that gave me something new to think about for a while.

  Six

  WRITING IS AN IDEAL OCCUPATION if you’re a rabbit. It gives you an excuse to stay in your burrow all day, and it allows you to explore problems like anguish and insecurity without having to solve them. You don’t need to have peace of mind to be a writer; in fact, the more troubled you feel, the more you have to write about. For some writers (I consider myself a member of this group), writing doesn’t happen as a result of ambition or self-discipline or love of literature. It happens for the same reason that a person who has an itch in the middle of his back will get up and find something to scratch it with: It is a means of relieving discomfort. The discomfort, in my case, happens to be the sort of emotional dissonance that an anxious mind projects onto the soundtrack of everyday experience.

  Put on a pair of headphones, choose a tune that really gets on your nerves, and then listen to it while exercising, driving, or washing the dishes. If you’re like me, you will find it an unpleasant experience. Now try doing the same thing while listening to the most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard. Feel better? That’s what writers like me want to do: provide a coherent, pleasing soundtrack for the chaos swirling around us all. We want to make the human experience of freedom and responsibility seem less gratuitously dark, or at least to present the darkness in such a way that it seems less irredeemably hateful.

  When it works, it feels great. When it doesn’t work, and the dissonance goes unresolved in spite of all your efforts, it leaves you feeling hopeless. This, if you ask me, is the reason why so many writers self-destruct. If art can’t relieve the discomfort, then what’s left?