Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison

If exuberance were a season, it would be spring; if it were a libation, it would be champagne. Don’t get this confused with mania, cautions Kay Redfield Jamison; mania would be more like summer and cocaine, if you get the distinction. If you don’t, maybe this’ll help: “In our time, ‘exuberance’ usually denotes a mood or temperament of joyfulness, ebullience, and high spirits, a state of overflowing energy and delight. It is more energetic than joy and enthusiasm, but less intense, although of longer duration, than ecstasy.”

Got all that? Good. Because that’s not all exuberance is. The exuberant also “move above the horizon, exposed and vulnerable,” which is another way of saying that even champagne bubbles sometimes go flat. But never mind: “If all were effervescent, the world would be an exhausting and chaotic place, driven to incoherence by competing enthusiasms or becalmed by indifference to the day-to-day requirements of life.”

Nevertheless, it’s high time exuberance received its literary due. As Jamison is quick to acknowledge, those who write books on psychology, “for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament,” have always tended to focus their energies on the darker side of the human mind, and Jamison herself is certainly complicit in that, as the author of books on suicide (Night Falls Fast), her own madness (An Unquiet Mind), and manic-depression as it relates to the artistic temperament (Touched by Fire). Now, as if to pay a penance, she’s returned with a book offering bright beams of hope, even if those beams do sometimes burn out at their source.

So this is a book about risk-takers and nature-lovers, the vain and the brilliant and the assertive, those who know what it is to feel musical bliss, religious ecstasy, and love fulfilled. This is a book about those people, which means that, at least in part, it’s a book about Theodore Roosevelt, who understood better than anyone that “black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” It’s also about John Muir, who convinced Roosevelt during his presidency that the sequoia groves of Yosemite were something to be exuberant about, and, hence, something very well worth preserving. To get a sense of the mad effervescence contained, just barely, inside Muir’s brain, we may have to quote at length:

Do behold the King in his glory, King Sequoia! Behold! Behold! seems all I can say. Some time ago I left all for Sequoia and have been and am at his feet; fasting and praying for light, for is he not the greatest light in the woods, in the world?…I’m in the woods, woods, woods, and they are in me-ee-ee. The King tree and I have sworn eternal love…. I’ve taken the sacrament with Douglas squirrel, drunk Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood….I wish I were so drunk and Sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the juiceless world, descending from this divine wilderness like John the Baptist … crying, Repent, for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand!

This is, of course, about the time exuberance crosses that thin line into mania, which is about the time one leaves oneself exposed and vulnerable to nature’s disappointments — exposed and vulnerable like the famous snowflake chronicler Wilson Bentley was exposed and vulnerable when he beheld “a wonderful little splinter of ice, incredibly fragile,” only to weep at the “tragedy” of its premature melting.

But don’t feel sorry for Muir and Bentley for all their easy excitability — for these two are among life’s lucky and passionate breed, the fortunate among us who are never content to wait idly for life’s good grace to visit, but who seize it where they can, and in some of the unlikeliest places. At its best, however, exuberance is hard-earned: George McGovern tells Jamison about finding this kind of exuberance twice in his life — once when returning home from all the horror and violence concomitant with being a fighter pilot in World War II (“a quiet exuberance that I’ll never forget”) and once when giving an acceptance speech upon being selected Democratic candidate via America’s battering electoral process (“the highlight of exuberance for me”).

It’s important also not to mistake the merely drugged for the truly exuberant, for that which goes artificially up will surely come crashing down. Jamison elaborates: “Cocaine, hashish, opium, Ecstasy: all seduce with the promise of rapture or exuberance — and then they collect.” Exuberance is perhaps most purely found in play, and play most purely found in exuberance: “We play because we have an abundance of spirits and energy, but we are also exuberant because we play.” At which point, it becomes easy to confuse exuberance for happiness, which is also incorrect: “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.” In other words, if complacency is bliss, then bliss should never be confused for exuberance, which should in turn never be confused for happiness.

Charles M. Schulz’s Snoopy is exuberance caricatured, but the most representative examples, from children’s literature, are probably Toad, from The Wind in the Willows, and Tigger, from The House at Pooh Corner, for 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.”

Exuberance is particularly well suited to the study of science, and Jamison interviews a good many scientists who attest to this, with their work as well as their words. For her own part, Jamison tells us of how exuberance “helps to overcome the tedium and setbacks intrinsic to scientific work, overrides mental and physical weariness, and makes risk-taking both attractive and probable,” but it’s the planetary scientist and physicist Andrew Cheng who’s quick to remind us that being exuberant also means you often “don’t focus sufficiently on a task, don’t get things done, there are too many projects…. If you’re working on a mission, you can’t do this. You need to work toward a launch date and those deadlines aren’t flexible. Planets have to be aligned just right. You have only one correct date for a launch.”

America, of course, is itself exuberance; it’s that restless, indomitable, searching quality responsible for everything settled west of the Mississippi. And then there’s the obvious example of the 1920s, during which America roared before finally crashing, inevitably, into a depression, from which it took a Roosevelt to rescue it. And Jamison believes that when it comes to the high rates of bipolar disorder in American immigrants, there may just be more there than meets the eye, as these are, after all, “Individuals who sought the new, who took risks that others would not, or who rebelled against repressive social systems….”

This is unsubstantiated, of course, but it’s no less compelling for that, as so much of this wonderful book is compelling. It’s Hazlitt who tells us of how it’s “passion, imagination, self-will, the sense of power, the very consciousness of our existence” which “bind[s] us to life,” and it’s Jamison herself, most eloquently of all, who reminds us, as if by this time we needed any reminding at all, that exuberance “is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.”