Exuberance: The Passion for Life (13 page)

(photo credit 5.1)

I
mprobably, the English invented Champagne. Decades before French winegrowers produced their first bottle of sparkling wine,
Christopher Merret described to the Royal Society in London the methods being used by English wine-coopers to make brisk and sparkling wines. The addition of vast quantities of sugar and molasses to a finished wine, he reported in 1662, provoked a second
fermentation, which created bubbles. This process, according to the
Champagne historian Tom Stevenson, made the English wine not just lively but “unequivocally sparkling.” Merret’s contemporary the great French wine master Dom Pérignon, far from cultivating bubbles in his wines, spent a great deal of time and energy
attempting to annihilate them.

The bubbles won out. Every second around the world
seven bottles of Champagne are uncorked. This, at
250 million bubbles in an average bottle, is a gloriously unimaginable amount of bubble and fizz. Champagne launches ships and marriages, marks the race won, the examinations finished. It is uniquely the wine of celebration, of joy, and of elegance. When Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in Gatsby’s gardens “
men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars,” only “champagne” could evoke the mood he wanted. Champagne
is
a mood, an austerely beautiful signifier and creator of moment and emotion. Dom Pérignon, despite his initial misgivings, is said to have exclaimed when he first tasted it, “Come quickly! I am tasting stars.”

Champagne is coolly and joyously incandescent. Evenings gain from it in vivacity, and its pleasures spread among those in its presence. Desire sharpens. “
Hardly did it appear,” wrote an eighteenth-century drinker of Champagne, “than from my mouth it passed into my heart.” Its bubbles generate an intoxicating gaiety; indeed, one wine authority believes that “
Champagne should laugh at you.” The bubbles, he contends, should be “extremely animated and persistent: When the glass is held to the light, it should be possible to spot them forming right down near the stem and watch them rocketing upwards like balls in a juggler’s hands.” Champagne, in short, is exuberant.

Human temperaments, like Champagnes, come in different degrees of effervescence. Some are
grands mousseaux
, fully
sparkling, unstoppable, bubbling, and relentlessly high-spirited. Others are
pétillants
, only faintly sparkling. Most are
crémants
, somewhere in between. The
grands mousseaux
infect others with their liveliness and bring to life’s delights and setbacks a seemingly inexhaustible energy and resilience. They carry into adulthood that full measure of joy which so many others leave behind with youth. It is written into the wild expansiveness of Whitman—“
O the joy of my spirit—it is uncaged—it darts like lightning! / It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time, / I will have thousands of globes and all time”—and we feel it in Churchill’s uninhibited passion for the brilliant colors on his palette: “
I must say I like bright colours. I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermillion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.”

For those less exuberant or not at all, one globe may be more than enough, and bright colors, while pleasing, will not transport. We vary in our capacities for enthusiasm because a diversity of temperaments serves our collective good. We know intuitively that some will be quick and passionate in their responses, as we know that others, less urgently moved, will wait and be more deliberative. For each the world has space and reason.

In their musical
Gigi
, based on the novella by Colette, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe put human differences in the capacity for joy, and the universal desire for it, at the heart of their words and music. Honoré, played by the ebullient Maurice Chevalier, loves women, wine, love, Paris, everything. He exults in life and is as enchanted by it as his nephew, Gaston (played by the mannerly,
devastatingly handsome Louis Jourdan), is jaded and bored. Honoré experiences the world as a source of wonder and thrill; for Gaston it provokes nothing but indifference and malaise. The French, it is said, touch Champagne to the lips of newborn babies. Clearly some remain under its spell longer than others.

Only the young schoolgirl Gigi (played by Leslie Caron), exuberant by youth and nature, can make Gaston laugh and relieve his ennui. But Gaston’s worldliness and imperturbability have, in turn, charm for Gigi: he is ballast to her scattered effervescence, a challenge to her unschooled gaieties. He can introduce her to the world of Maxim’s, white tie, and tails; to Champagne and dancing; to love, desire, and restraint. He has the pleasure of being disarmed, she of disarming. Yet it is Gigi’s exuberance and joie de vivre that linger long after the film is over. To “
fly to the sky on Champagne / And shout to everyone in sight” is, as Gigi sings in “The Night They Invented Champagne,” the essence of exuberance. Uninhibited joy such as hers is captivating, contagious, and a powerful psychological force. It is, however, a psychological force that has been of more interest to songwriters than to most psychologists.

Exuberance, it is safe to say, has not been a mainstay of psychological research. Until recently,
psychology textbooks have devoted more than twice as much space to “negative” emotions like depression and anxiety as they do to “positive” ones like joy and happiness; the most dynamic of the positive emotions, exuberance, is scarcely studied at all.
For every hundred journal articles on sadness or depression, calculates psychologist Martin Seligman, only one is published about happiness.
Cross-cultural analyses of language find that in virtually every society there are many more concepts for negative emotional states than for positive ones. This, in the context of the richness of human experience, seems on the face of it hard to comprehend. Yet it makes sense, at least up to a point, to focus on psychopathology and potentially destructive emotions
or dangerous circumstances. They, not joy or happiness, raise awareness of immediate threats to the individual and to society. Pathological behavior can incapacitate or kill, and it can create dangerous instability within a group.
Survival is made more likely by a biological and emotional system that is highly focused, alert to peril, and ready to handle threat with dispatch. Positive emotions, in this context, could be viewed as an evolutionary luxury.

Indeed,
brain imaging studies conducted at the University of Iowa demonstrate that when subjects are shown emotionally pleasant pictures (for instance, landscape scenes, fireworks, and dolphins playing with a ball); unpleasant pictures (a bird covered in oil, a dead soldier with part of his face missing, a rotting carcass of a dog); or pictures that are neutral (an open umbrella, a woven basket, leaves on a tree), the unpleasant pictures provoke activation in the primitive, subcortical parts of the brain conceptualized by scientists as an ancient danger-recognition system. The pleasant pictures, on the other hand, activate a phylogenetically much younger part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. Danger, the researchers conclude, requires a quick and relatively simple response system; the ability to appreciate the positive in situations requires, on the other hand, a more sophisticated level of processing in the brain.

But, as we have seen, nature has taken care to create a capacity for delight and prolonged enthusiasm. These exuberant and otherwise affirmative states can generate alternative solutions to menace and hazard, foster resilience and social bonds, and reward successful behavior with an infusion of pleasure. The brain systems necessary to appreciate the auspicious and to fashion a fitting response are recent but vital. The study of the pursuit and harnessing of the auspicious, however, has been skipped over in favor of understanding danger, distress, and disease.

My colleagues and I, for example, published a paper more than twenty years ago about
positive experiences associated with mania.
In our review of the medical and psychological literature on mania—an admittedly destructive state, but one that in its milder forms is often characterized by many advantageous qualities such as high energy, exuberance, increased sexual desire, and rapid, creative, and expansive thinking—we were stunned to see how disproportionately psychological research had focused on negative emotions and how slight was the mention of temperamental strengths. Our field was more interested in the depressed and anxious brain than in what Coleridge so marvelously described as the “
Bright Bubbles of the … ebullient brain.” As clinicians, we of course knew that psychologists and psychiatrists are obligated to ameliorate suffering, not to root around for benefits that might derive from it. We are asked to find remedies. Suffering demands action in a way that pleasure and success do not.

Still, as a clinical psychologist interested not only in psychosis and suicide but in creativity and the arts as well, I was disconcerted to see how far our field had moved away from the wide-ranging and profound interests of David Hume and William James, how far behind we had left our earlier attempts to understand passion, imagination, and the nature of human greatness. I was far from alone in these concerns.

Psychology has begun to catch up with its earlier, broader interests. In the last two decades, psychologists have brought new life and better science to the study of positive psychological traits. The number of articles published about “positive psychology” and “positive emotions” has quadrupled over the last two decades. In January 2000
an entire issue of
American Psychologist
was dedicated to the topic of “Positive Psychology: Happiness, Excellence, and Optimal Human Functioning.” The issue’s coeditors, Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the Claremont Graduate University in California, are well-respected researchers and writers who have pioneered the
study of optimism and optimal experiences. They argued powerfully for an emphasis on those aspects of human nature which enhance life and productivity, capacities that might one day prevent mental illness, not simply contend with it once it occurs. “
Our message,” they wrote in
American Psychologist
, “is to remind our field that psychology is not just the study of pathology, weakness, and damage; it is also the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken; it is nurturing what is best. Psychology is not just a branch of medicine concerned with illness or health; it is much larger. It is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play.” Their statement was an eloquent call to the field.

Psychology has always, if insufficiently, concerned itself with individual differences in personality and temperament. Basic emotions such as joy, anger, and fear are universal, but individuals vary enormously in the nature, quickness, and intensity of their emotional responses. Emotions are innate, although susceptible to alteration through experience and the environment, and they exist to alert us to specific and significant situations such as danger or opportunity, so that we respond in a visceral way to gain advantage or to increase our chances of survival. These emotional responses—such as increased heart rate, a surge of adrenaline, or physical shutdown—tend to be of rapid onset and short duration. Most consistently, they are characterized by two principal psychological dimensions, “pleasantness” and “activation.”

Emotions can be placed along a continuum of subjective enjoyment that ranges from pleasant to unpleasant, and another continuum of alertness and energy that ranges from high activation to low. This dimensionality approach to emotions to some extent circumvents William James’s apt observation about the futility of rigid categories: “
The trouble with the emotions in psychology,” he wrote more than a hundred years ago, “is that they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things. So long as they are set down
as so many eternal and sacred psychic entities, like the old immutable species in natural history, so long all that
can
be done with them is reverently to catalogue their separate characters, points, and effects.” Modern psychological science views emotions in far more complex ways than observers did in James’s time.

Exuberance, under this model, can be conceptualized as high on the pleasantness (or “positive affect”) dimension, as well as
high on activation. This combination of positive emotion and high energy is far more likely to result in an active engagement with the world than depression or anxiety, which are psychological states hallmarked by avoidant and fearful behaviors and lacking in drive. Exuberance is also more likely than happiness alone to lead to new and energetic pursuits. Happiness is a less activated emotional state and one that is, by definition, more content with the way things are than eagerly gauging possibilities of how things might be in the future. Joy, on the other hand, lures the individual forward with further promise of pleasure for, as C. S. Lewis has observed,
anyone who experiences joy will want it again.

Exuberance encourages exploration and rewards it with the possibility of joy and greater opportunity for food, territory, and mates. But exploration also increases the likelihood of danger to the individual. The active, exploring animal is more vulnerable to predators and the elements than the timid one who is likely to remain sheltered and camouflaged, more protected by remaining within the group than if it ventures out on its own.
Captive foxes who are fearful of new situations and strangers, for example, are far less likely than their bolder littermates to be killed by predators and automobiles once they are released into the wild.
Guppies, even, show a range of intrepidness. Most, sensibly enough, will keep their distance when placed near larger fish. A fearless and curious few males, however, will swim toward a potential predator. Not surprisingly, they are more likely to be eaten, but those who are not
prove to be more attractive mates to the surviving female guppies. Trepidation cuts both ways.