Exuberance: The Passion for Life Read online

  A child is impressionable by nature, and made more lastingly so through play. Studies of children find that memory is sharper as a result of playing and that play increases performance on a variety of measures of intelligence. In many respects, as Bernd Heinrich suggests in his study of ravens, play is quite similar to the workings of intelligence. It is, Heinrich writes, “an acting out of options, among which the best can then be chosen, strengthened, or facilitated in the future.” But whereas the maneuverings of intellect are abstract, in play the options are played out overtly. Play, a substantial body of research has shown, promotes flexibility in children’s thinking and behavior, much as it appears to increase the behavioral options available to other young animals. The playwright James Barrie expressed a similar idea in a letter he wrote to the boys who had been his inspiration for Peter Pan. “One by one,” he said, “as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe, you reached the tree of knowledge.”

  The more playful the child, psychologists find, the more creativity he or she is likely to demonstrate. Highly creative children and adolescents are far more playful than their highly intelligent but less creative peers. Play appears to exert a particularly strong effect on children’s ability to produce flexible and original associations when they are shown an object or placed in a new setting. The level of elation affects the imaginativeness of play. The more joyful and exuberant the child is while playing, the more creative the structure and content of the play itself.

  Psychologists who study children have discovered two dimensions of play that are directly relevant to the concept of exuberant play. “Physical spontaneity” refers to the high-energy physical activity level shown in running, skipping, hopping, and jumping about. Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College and the author of Gifted Children, observes that exuberance, especially of the sort found in highly gifted children, is often first and most strikingly apparent as high energy during infancy. Parents of gifted children, Winner finds, report that their children, even when very young, were unusually active, slept far less than other children, and were exceptionally alert and curious. She believes this drive is a stable one, a characteristic that carries on into and characterizes the adult lives of those who are exuberant and creative.

  “Manifest joy,” on the other hand, refers to a child’s expression of enjoyment during play; that is, the child’s level of enthusiasm and exuberance. Manifest joy, like physical spontaneity, is a persistent trait; if a child scores high on this measure in kindergarten he or she is very likely to score high on it in high school (and almost certainly beyond high school as well, although this has not been studied in a systematic way). The centrality of elated mood to playfulness has been demonstrated in many investigations.

  Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity. This is a lesson too often lost on competitive parents and educators. The average school-age child in the United States, it has been estimated, now has 40 percent less free time than twenty years ago. Recess has been entirely eliminated in many elementary schools, and lawsuits have brought a “safe” sterility to the equipment on most playgrounds. Chemistry kits explode less often, but they are also a bit less magical. Long lazy days of just “messing about” are now filled with lessons, and games so structured as to teach little of what could be more interestingly and originally learned in wide-open roughhousing and aimless exploration.

  It is essential to explore wild places, to expect that hazard will exist in most interesting places and circumstances, and to not be so fearful of injury or germs as to make childhood a shell of what it should be. “It is better to have a broken bone than a broken spirit,” as one opponent of “safe” playgrounds has put it. Children need to be given a long lead to explore and the encouragement to play heedlessly and exuberantly with other children; to make painful mistakes; to fall down, lollop, get lost in the woods, run madly about. They need to galumph.

  We all need both wild woods and sheltered riverbanks. Complex environments allow for complex play and probing. Like the brains of the wild trout and caged mice, our brains will acquire the complexity to which we are exposed. Exuberant play thrusts us into more elaborated and wonderful worlds, and the delight we take in such worlds kindles, in turn, a desire to persist in play and exploration.

  Exuberant playfulness ends for many with childhood or adolescence. For others it remains. Margaret Mead, for one, was intrigued by this. “I am interested,” she wrote, “in what happens to people who find the whole of life so rewarding that they are able to move through it with the same kind of delight in which a child moves through a game.” Or, as T. H. Huxley said, the ability to perceive the world anew, the temperament “to face nature like a child.” This exuberance, this freshness and playfulness of mind and mood, the capacity to galumph, are surely things to try to hold on to. It was said of John Muir that he never grew old, that he retained throughout his life a “child heart.” And Theodore Roosevelt, at the age of fifty-five, was still a wildly enthusiastic man and utterly determined to help map the unexplored River of Doubt, which flows through the Amazonian rain forest. “I have to go,” he said. “It’s my last chance to be a boy!” (He did go. It was a trip of Rooseveltian proportions, fraught with poisonous snakes, equatorial fevers, violent rapids, insanity, and drownings. The expedition was high drama from beginning to end, and in the end, perhaps not surprisingly, the river was renamed Rio Roosevelt.) Nothing, in fact, was able to kill Roosevelt’s passionate enthusiasm until the death of his son Quentin in World War I. Then, a friend of his noted, “the boy in him had died.”

  To keep alive the exuberance of youth is to keep alive the possibilities of imagination and play. “Each morning I am something new,” sings the young girl in Delmore Schwartz’s poem:

  “I am cherry alive,” the little girl sang,

  “Each morning I am something new:

  I am apple, I am plum, I am just as excited

  As the boys who made the Hallowe’en bang:

  I am tree, I am cat, I am blossom too:

  When I like, if I like, I can be someone new,

  Someone very old, a witch in a zoo:

  I can be someone else whenever I think who,

  And I want to be everything sometimes too:

  · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

  But I don’t tell the grown-ups: because it is sad,

  And I want them to laugh just like I do

  Because they grew up and forgot what they knew

  And they are sure I will forget it some day too.

  They are wrong. They are wrong. When I sang my song, I knew, I knew!

  I am red, I am gold, I am green, I am blue,

  I will always be me, I will always be new!”

  The young girl instinctively shields her joy from the adults who have forgotten or left behind that which she knows so clearly to be true. Childhood is not the only province of discovery and exuberance, but it is perhaps the most natural.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “The Glowing Hours”

  (photo credit 4.1)

  Always childhood ends. Nearly always, the unrestrained exuberance of youth ends with it. The kite is wound in, wonder shades into familiarity, and the skipping stops. Restraint accrues slowly, giving way to greater sophistication and savoir-faire. Childhood enthusiasm forfeits a portion of its charm: more and more it is to be dampened or subtly honed, kept to oneself, remolded into more worldly intimations of pleasure. The rising expectations of life exact a toll from the young as they are obliged to face them.

  It is fortunate that the muting of exuberance is neither rapid nor absolute. Youth is, after all, a time to fly and fall on enthusiasm, to act with audacity. The world of the young is meant for scuttling about and, as we have seen, nature gives the time and means for this. Evolution invests heavily in the child’s long days of eager adventure
, reaping its returns in the adult’s more informed sallyings forth of mind and body. But youth does it first and with greater abandon. This is the time, as Robert Louis Stevenson has it, to go “flashing from one end of the world to the other.” It is a rash and full and delighting time.

  Yet youth is a confusing, disturbing time as well. Emotions are inconstant and hard to sort through. Exuberant moods swing into darker ones, often ferociously and without apparent reason. Acquaintances differ greatly in character and temperament, and it is not clear how to respond to the differences or whom to trust. Play and other activities of childhood provide some experience for navigating these straits, but more is needed. Someone, a Virgil or a Merlin, is required to help guide the young through the emotional terrain they will encounter; someone to enchant and enthrall; someone to lay out the geography of the child’s imagination, to provide an introduction to the bewildering array of personalities and situations likely to be met; someone to make sense of the discord and to help put conflicting emotions into meaningful perspective; someone to sort out friend from foe, valuable enthusiasm from folly. Experience will do this to some extent, of course, and so will watching and learning from the actions of those who are older. But writers, too, chart the minds and feelings of children; they draw up imaginary worlds for the young and fill those lands with hopes and dangers, discord and adventure, so that children might explore them under the protection of imagination before having to take them on in reality.

  These inventors of worlds are the great writers of children’s stories—Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, E. B. White, A. A. Milne, Walter R. Brooks, Pamela Lyndon Travers, Louisa May Alcott, and L. Frank Baum, among others—and they lay out brilliantly the anxieties and possibilities of youth, able to do so at least partly because they themselves had such ready access to their own experiences as children. Max Beerbohm wrote that James Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, “stripped off himself the last remnants of a pretense of maturity.… Mr. Barrie is not that rare creature, a man of genius. He is something even more rare—a child who, by some divine grace, can express through an artistic medium the childishness that is in him.” Barrie himself said it somewhat differently: “I think one remains the same person throughout [life], merely passing, as it were, in these lapses of time from one room to another, but all in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of the far past we can peer in and see ourselves, busily occupied in beginning to become you and me.” And: “Perhaps we do change; except a little something in us which is no larger than a mote in the eye, and that, like it, dances in front of us beguiling us all our days. I cannot cut the hair by which it hangs.” Kenneth Grahame, who wrote The Wind in the Willows, remarked to a friend, “I can still remember everything I felt then; the part of my brain I used from four till about seven can never have altered.”

  Writers with such genius for tapping into the emotions of childhood nearly always find ample room for exuberance and joy in the worlds and characters they create. They give a second-to-none view of what it is like to be exuberant—by nature or transiently so—and what it is like to be in the often delightful, occasionally annoying company of someone who is infectiously, boundingly ebullient.

  There can be no more unforgettable examples of exuberance than Toad in The Wind in the Willows and Tigger in The House at Pooh Corner. They are the grands mousseaux of the temperament: bubbling and exhausting; exasperating, irrepressible, and unavoidable. Both are irritating, charming, and faintly if not overtly ridiculous. Their enthusiasms are urgent but fickle.

  Tigger, a less nuanced exuberant than Toad, bounces into and out of the lives of Winnie-the-Pooh and the other inhabitants of A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. Nearly everyone is unsettled by Tigger’s high-springing, discombobulating ways, but his presence is particularly ungluing to the dyspeptic Eeyore and timorous Piglet. “Could you ask your friend to do his exercises somewhere else?” Eeyore peevishly implores Pooh. “I shall be having lunch directly, and don’t want it bounced on just before I begin. A trifling matter and fussy of me, but we all have our little ways.” Piglet, a Very Small Animal, finds the high-voltage Tigger a Very Bouncy Animal, and unnerving, “with a way of saying How-do-you-do, which always left your ears full of sand.” Despite Tigger’s warmth and friendliness, his energy and impulsiveness overwhelm the anxious Piglet. To Rabbit, who finds Tigger more annoying than intimidating, Tigger is the sort “who was always in front when you were showing him anywhere, and was generally out of sight when at last you came to the place and said proudly ‘Here we are!’ ”

  Pooh, who is less disconcerted by Tigger (even though Tigger hides behind trees and jumps out on Pooh’s shadow when he isn’t looking), and more predictably focused on food and figure, takes his measure of Tigger into verse:

  But whatever his weight in pounds,

  shillings, and ounces,

  He always seems bigger

  because of his bounces.

  Pooh’s point is a good one: exuberance tends to leave the impression that its possessor is larger than life. (Piglet, less interested in the fine points of temperament, objects to the shillings: “I don’t think they ought to be there.” Pooh explains, “They wanted to come in after the pounds so I let them.”)

  The lively and gregarious Tigger bounds about the forest, leaping from one short-lived enthusiasm to the next: honey to haycorns, haycorns to thistles, thistles to Extract of Malt, which he then has for breakfast, dinner, and tea. The certainty with which Tigger holds his enthusiasms is met only by the quickness with which he abandons them. He is sure beyond reckoning, until forced to reckon. Tiggers are very good flyers, he exults, “Stornry good flyers.” And excellent jumpers. And swimmers. Or, at least, until they are not. “Can they climb trees better than Pooh?” asks Roo, himself no piker in the bounce-and-joy division. “Climbing trees is what they do best,” declares Tigger without equivocation. And thus begins their catastrophic scramble up the tree and subsequent plummet through the branches. It is considerably easier to be propelled up the tree by one’s exuberance, Tigger finds, than to get back down. Tiggers cannot climb downward—their tails get in the way—and only by crashing to the ground can Tigger finally get himself untreed. Tigger is irrepressible, however; despite the ignominy, he springs upward and onward, unencumbered by the prudence that might attach to anyone else less helium-borne. Experience slows him not at all.

  Nearly twenty years earlier, Kenneth Grahame had described in The Wind in the Willows a similarly irrepressible animal. The “gay and irresponsible” Mr. Toad of Toad Hall is a whirligig of energy and contradictions: self-absorbed, yet generous; self-satisfied, yet quick to contrition; restless, yet oddly content. Most of all, Toad is a caricature of exuberance: carefree, expansive, impulsive, and hopelessly given to short-lived enthusiasms. He is, in all things and at all times, utterly over the top. Toad chases after one horizon only to find that he really seeks another. He is dazzled by new fads and smitten by delusions of his own cleverness.

  Mole, an enthusiastic but not exuberant animal, is eager to meet Toad but warned of his excesses by the Rat, who knows Toad all too well: “Once, it was nothing but sailing,” said the Rat. “Then he tired of that and took to painting.… Last year it was house-boating.… It’s all the same, whatever he takes up; he gets tired of it, and starts on something fresh.” Toad’s current enchantment, Mole learns, is a canary-yellow, horse-drawn Gypsy caravan with bright red wheels. Soon Toad’s infectious enthusiasm becomes Mole’s:

  “There you are!” cried the Toad, straddling and expanding himself. “There’s real life for you, embodied in that little cart. The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing! And mind, this is the very finest cart of its sort that was ever built, without any exception.”… The Toad simply let himself go. Disregardi
ng the Rat, he proceeded to play upon the inexperienced Mole as on a harp. Naturally a voluble animal, and always mastered by his imagination, he painted the prospects of the trip and the joys of the open life and the roadside in such glowing colours that the Mole could hardly sit in his chair for excitement.

  Mole is no sooner swept up by Toad’s ardor for life on the road than Toad is fanatically into his next obsession, a magnificent motorcar, which blasts down the highway stirring up dust and Toad’s combustible passions with it. The canary cart is forgotten; it no longer has any hold on him. Toad is capsized by rapture: a new world is in front of him: “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day—in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody’s else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!” Toad’s world is the road ahead.

  “What are we going to do with him?” asked the Mole of the Water Rat.

  “Nothing at all,” replied the Rat firmly. “Because there is really nothing to be done. You see, I know him from of old. He is now possessed. He has got a new craze, and it always takes him that way, in its first stage. He’ll continue like that for days now, like an animal walking in a happy dream, quite useless for all practical purposes.”

  Toad’s exuberance, like that of Tigger, is put into relief by the countervailing temperaments of the other animals. In Tigger’s world there are, in addition to the bouncier characters, cautious, melancholic, and fearful animals as well: Piglet, for example, is afraid of All Things Fierce, and Eeyore is a moper who tries to convince Pooh that “We can’t all, and some of us don’t…[do] Gaiety [or] Song-and-dance.” Toad, too, is surrounded by characters very different from himself: the wise and gruff and balanced Badger; the practical, then poetic and dreamy-minded, and then again practical Rat; and Mole, “an animal of tilled field and hedgerow,” of quiet but determining enthusiasms, an animal needful of the anchorage of his old home, yet passionately open to the wider world of sun and air and the River. Their adventures are far different from the flamboyant ones of Toad.