The Antidote (22 page)
Authors: Oliver Burkeman
Tags: #Self-Help, #happiness, #personal development
âIn our tradition,' observes the writer Victor Landa, who was raised in Mexico, âpeople die three deaths. The first is when our bodies cease to function; when our hearts no longer beat of their own accord, when our gaze no longer has depth or weight, when the space we occupy slowly loses its meaning. The second death comes when the body is lowered into the ground ⦠the third death, the most definitive death, is when there is no one left alive to remember us.' Death was omnipresent that night in the cemetery, and yet - precisely as a consequence of that - the third kind of death was absent. An entire town was remembering. And remembering, too, their own mortality, which differed from their dead relatives' only in the sense that it had not claimed them yet.
You need not engage in cemetery vigils to practise
memento
mori,
however. You can start much smaller. The psychologist Russ Harris suggests a simple exercise: imagine you are eighty years old - assuming you're not eighty already, that is; if you are, you'll have to pick an older age - and then complete the sentences âI wish I'd spent more time on ⦠â, and âI wish I'd spent less time on ⦠â. This turns out to be a surprisingly effective way to achieve mortality awareness in short order. Things fall into place. It becomes far easier to follow Lauren Tillinghast's advice - to figure out what, specifically, you might do in order to focus on life's flavours, so as to improve your chances of reaching death having lived life as fully and as deeply as possible.
This kind of smaller habit may actually be the most powerful form of
memento mori.
For it is precisely through such mundane and unassuming rituals that we can best hope to enfold an awareness of death into the daily rhythms of life, and thus achieve something of Epicurus's calm rationality in the face of mortality. What lingered in my mind for months after Mexico, in any case, was not the loud celebration of death, though I had seen some of that in central Mexico City. Instead, it was the sense I had absorbed, in San Gregorio Atlapulco, of relaxing alongside mortality, of comfortably coexisting with it, of the companionship of life and death.
Before we left the village that night, some time before two in the morning, I noticed an elderly woman, sitting alone on a folding chair near one of the cemetery's boundary walls. She was wrapped in a shawl and appeared to be talking softly to a head-stone.
Tentatively, I approached her. Interrupting felt wrong, but she wasn't hostile; smiling, she nodded at the ledge beside the grave, inviting me to sit. So I sat.
The strains of the mariachi band drifted over from the other
side of the cemetery. Some families, I noticed, had built small wood fires to keep warm; a few feet away, Francisco clapped his arms around himself in an effort to generate heat. I looked out over the cemetery, strewn with marigolds and crowded with huddled figures. Beyond its edges, no lights illuminated the blackness, but inside, the fires and the hundreds of flickering candles lent the night a kind of cosiness, despite the chill. The musicians carried on playing. Death was in the air, and all was well.
Negative Capability
I
N
D
ECEMBER
1817,
THE
poet John Keats, then twenty-two years old, went to see the annual Christmas pantomime at the Theatre Royal, in London's Drury Lane. Also in attendance was his friend, the critic Charles Wentworth Dilke, and as they strolled home, the two men fell into conversation - about writing, and specifically about the nature of literary genius. Somewhere between the theatre in Soho and his home in Hampstead, Keats was struck by a realisation, which he set down several days later in a letter to his brothers. That letter records what one Keats biographer has called âa touchstone moment' in the history of literature:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously: I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason â¦
There is something both awe-inspiring and perhaps faintly irritating about a twenty-two-year-old not only capable of such insights, but capable of having them so casually, on the way home from the pantomime. For Keats, such observations had always come effortlessly and frequently, as in some sense they needed to; three years later, he was dead. He thought so little of ânegative capability', in fact, that he never used the phrase in writing again, thereby generously providing future literary scholars with the opportunity to write entire books dedicated to unpicking what he might have meant.
At this point in our journey along the negative path to happiness, however, the outline of what he was saying ought at least to sound familiar. Sometimes, the most valuable of all talents is to be able
not
to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and
not
to feel compelled to follow where it leads. Keats thought this addiction to certainty and completion was Dilke's biggest flaw, and the poet's verdict on his friend neatly encapsulates a theme we've encountered many times already: âHe will never come at a truth so long as he lives,' Keats wrote, âbecause he is always trying at it.' It was the trying - the âirritable reaching' - that was the whole problem.
More loosely defined, ânegative capability' is really just another term for living in accordance with the âbackwards law' - and it might be a good label to describe the chief talent I kept discovering among the people I encountered in the course of researching this book. What they all shared was this same turn of mind, which I came to visualise as a sort of graceful mental dance step: a willingness to adopt an oblique stance towards one's own inner life; to pause and take a step back; to turn to face what others might flee from; and to realise that the shortest apparent route to a positive mood is rarely a sure path to a more profound kind
of happiness. The phrase ânegative capability' also helps to clarify a subtle double meaning in the word ânegative'. It refers both to a set of skills that involve ânot-doing', as opposed to doing - a negative kind of capability - as well as to the fact that this skill involves confronting negative (as in âunpleasant') thoughts, emotions, and situations.
The point here is not that negative capability is always superior to the positive kind. Optimism is wonderful; goals can sometimes be useful; even positive thinking and positive visualisation have their benefits. The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity, and of the skills of âdoing', in how we think about happiness, and that we chronically undervalue negativity, and the ânot-doing' skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure. To use an old cliché of therapy-speak, we spend too much of our lives seeking âclosure'. Even those of us who mock such clichés are often motivated by a craving to put an end to uncertainty and anxiety, whether by convincing ourselves that the future is bright, or by resigning ourselves despondently to the expectation that it won't be. What we need more of, instead, is what the psychologist Paul Pearsall called âopenture'. Yes, this is an awkward neologism. But its very awkwardness is a reminder of the spirit that it expresses, which includes embracing imperfection, and easing up on the search for neat solutions.
The various approaches we have explored here frequently contradict each other on the level of details; sometimes, they seem so intrinsically paradoxical as practically to contradict themselves. But in this broader sense, they all embody ânegative capability'. For the Stoics, the realisation that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can't choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility. For the Buddhists, a willingness to
observe the âinner weather' of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions. Each of these is a different way of resisting the âirritable reaching' after better circumstances, or better thoughts and feelings. But negative capability need not involve embracing an ancient philosophical or religious tradition. It is also the skill you're exhibiting when you move forward with a project - or with life - in the absence of sharply defined goals; when you dare to inspect your failures; when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity; or when you put aside âmotivational' techniques in favour of actually getting things done.
You might choose, of course, to dedicate your life to Stoicism, like Keith Seddon in his wizard's cottage in Watford; you might undergo a completely life-transforming experience in the manner of Eckhart Tolle. But you can also treat these ideas as a toolkit, from which tools can be borrowed as necessary. Anyone can become somewhat Stoic, or a bit more Buddhist, or practise
memento mori
a little more frequently; unlike far too many selfhelp schemes, which purport to be comprehensive guides to life, the negative path to happiness isn't an all-or-nothing affair. True negative capability entails moderation and balance and refraining from too much effortful struggling - including in the practice of negative capability. âProficiency and the results of proficiency', wrote Aldous Huxley, âcome only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold.'
And the end result of all of this? The chief benefit of âopenture', Paul Pearsall claimed, is not certitude or even calm or comfort as we normally think of them, but rather the âstrange, excited comfort [of] being presented with, and grappling with, the
tremendous mysteries life offers'. Ultimately, what defines the âcult of optimism' and the culture of positive thinking - even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms - is that it abhors a mystery. It seeks to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness - even if you do manage to achieve it - is shallow and unsatisfying. The greatest benefit of negative capability, and the true power of negative thinking, is that it lets the mystery back in.
One of the worst things about being a motivational speaker, or any other kind of advocate for the power of positive thinking, must be the constant pressure to seem upbeat: if anyone ever catches you scowling, or stressed, or feeling sorry for yourself - all very normal occurrences for anybody, of course - it threatens to undermine everything you stand for. Becoming an advocate for the power of negative thinking, as I gradually did, holds no such hazard. Bad moods are permitted. Still, the ultimate purpose of all these adventures in negativity was supposed to be happiness. So you'd be entitled to wonder whether the philosophies and psychological techniques I encountered actually made me any happier - and which of them, after all the travelling and the reporting was over, retained a place in my life. Did the negative path to happiness really work? To answer that question with a simple âYes' or âNo', or to offer up a list of ten surefire tips for negative-thinking success, would be to violate the ethos of the thing. âOpenture' surely demands that we resist such tempting certainties. But I can offer an interim status report.
I did not make it a regular habit to humiliate myself on public transport systems in major cities. Nor did I relocate to rural Mexico, to live a life infused with death. So far, I haven't even
been on another silent meditation retreat since my week in Massachusetts. But in numerous smaller ways, a modest degree of negative capability has become my daily practice. Few days now go by without some occasion on which I'll deploy what I have come to think of as the âStoic pause' - which is all that it takes to remember that it's my judgment about the infuriating colleague, or the heavy traffic, or the burned food, that is the cause of my distress, not the situation itself. Even five or ten minutes'
vipassana
meditation, meanwhile, which I manage most mornings, is sufficient to feel as if I've applied a squirt of WD-40 to my mental machinery: for the rest of the day, problematic thoughts and emotions slip by with far less friction. Eckhart Tolle's deceptively simple-sounding question - âDo you have a problem
right now?'
- is a marvellous antidote to low-level stress. And I certainly could never have finished writing this book without Shoma Morita's insight that there's no need to âget motivated' (or Get Motivated!) before you get on and act. In friendships and in my relationship with my girlfriend, I came to understand more deeply that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing. And at least once a week, I have reason to call to mind Albert Ellis's distinction between a very bad outcome and an absolutely terrible one. Imagining worst-case scenarios is one of my greatest sources of solace in life, actually. When you really try to answer, rationally and in detail, the question âWhat's the worst that could happen?', the answer is sometimes pretty bad. But it is finitely bad, rather than infinitely terrifying, so there is always a chance of coping with it. Or at least I think there is. I'm acutely aware that, during the time I spent exploring this perspective on life, no great tragedies befell me, and my family and friends largely thrived. Like a good Stoic, I tried to stay conscious of that, so as to derive happiness from feeling gratitude for my good fortune.
But for me personally, the real test of these philosophies may lie in the future.
Already, though, I can see that where these techniques ultimately lead is to somewhere beyond âtechniques', to a different definition of happiness itself. The real revelation of the ânegative path' was not so much the path as the destination. Embracing negativity as a technique, in the end, only really makes sense if the happiness you're aiming for is one that can accommodate negative as well as positive emotions. The aforementioned Paul Pearsall, inventor of âopenture', spent a large part of his life waging a lonely battle of which John Keats would surely have approved: to get the concept of âawe' accepted by the psychological establishment as one of the primary human emotions, alongside such standards as love, joy, anger, fear, and sadness. âUnlike all the other emotions,' he argued, awe âis all of our feelings rolled up into one intense one. You can't peg it as just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful. Instead, it's a matter of experiencing all these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable, emotion.' Awe, he writes, âis like trying to assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. We're never allowed to know when this fantastic voyage might end ⦠but that's part of the life-disorienting chaos that makes this choice so thrillingly difficult.' Which seems, to me, as good a description as any of a happiness that is worthy of the name. This kind of happiness has nothing to do with the easy superficialities of positive thinking - with the grinning insistence on optimism at all costs, or the demand that success be guaranteed. It involves much more difficulty - and also much more authenticity - than that.
