`Glee and Admiration'

Above all personal qualities I admire resilience. By this I mean indifference to adversity, an enthusiasm for getting on with the business at hand and unwillingness to linger over pain, fear, inconvenience, resentment or self-pity. Resilience is associated with soldiers and saints, but among the most resilient characters I know was the unwarlike, unsaintly William James, who wrestled with depression, neurasthenia and thoughts of suicide but worked like a slave and maintained a confounding zest for life.

At 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, James was lying in bed, awake, in his apartment on the campus of Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif. His wife was still asleep in the adjoining room when, in James’ words, his bed began to “waggle.” This was the start of what we know as the great San Francisco earthquake. It last 48 seconds. James was 64 years old, and he described his experiences at Stanford in “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake.” The article, collected in Essays on Psychology, is less than eight pages long in the standard edition published by Harvard University Press. What interests me most about the piece is not James’ speculations on the psychological impact of trauma, or his reports from the epicenter of the quake in San Francisco in the subsequent days, but his initial reaction to the event: “…my first consciousness was one of gleeful recognition of the nature of the movement.” This is more than the studied coolness of a scientist observing violent phenomena. This is a man having fun:

“The emotion consisted wholly of glee and admiration; glee at the vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term as `earthquake’ could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely; and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden house could hold itself together in spite of such a shaking. I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.

“`Go it,’ I almost cried aloud, `and go it stronger!’”

Don’t confuse his spirited response with bluster and braggadocio. James’ instinct was to revel in new, disorienting, even dangerous experiences. I say I admire resilience, but even more I admire James’ energetic embrace of the unexpected. In his essay, he clearly relives the earthquake, milks it for all its novelty and shock value. I write this as a person who shuns rides at the amusement park, who drives the speed limit out of fear, and who avoids tall buildings and their imminent collapse. James reminds of another writer I admire inordinately, Isaac Babel, the Jew who rode with the Cossacks. James’ latest biographer, Robert D. Richardson, says this about the philosopher and the earthquake:

“This risk-taking, this avidity for the widest possible range of conscious experience, predisposed him to embrace things that many of us might find unsettling. It has been suggested that the earthquake experience was for James the near equivalent of a war experience. It may have been that, and it may have been even more than that. He no longer believed – if he ever had – in a fixed world built on a solid foundation. The earthquake was for him a hint of the real condition of thing, the real situation. The earthquake revealed a world (likes James’ own conception of consciousness) that was pure flux having nothing stable, permanent, or absolute in it.”