The Schopenhauer Cure

A Novel

Irvin D. Yalom

To my community of older buddies who grace me with their friendship, share life`s

inexorable diminishments and losses, and continue to sustain me with their wisdom and

dedication to the life of the mind: Robert Berger, Murray Bilmes, Martel Bryant, Dagfinn

Føllesdahl, Joseph Frank, Van Harvey, Julius Kaplan, Herbert Kotz, Morton Lieberman,

Walter Sokel, Saul Spiro, and Larry Zaroff.

8

Halcyon Days

of Early

Childhood

_________________________

Religionhas everything on its

side: revelation, prophecies,

government protection, the

highest dignity and

eminence...and more than this,

the invaluable prerogative of

being allowed to imprint its

doctrines on the mind at a

tender age of childhood,

whereby they become almost

innate ideas.

_________________________

Johanna wrote in her diary that after Arthur`s birth in February 1788 she, like all young

mothers, enjoyed playing with her «new doll.» But new dolls soon become old dolls, and

within months Joanna wearied of her toy and languished in boredom and isolation in

Danzig. Something new was emerging in Johanna—some vague sense that motherhood

was not her true destiny, that some other future awaited her. Her summers at the

Schopenhauer country estate were particularly difficult. Though Heinrich, accompanied

by a clergyman, joined her for weekends, Johanna spent the rest of her time alone with

Arthur and her servants. Because of his fierce jealousy, Heinrich forbade his wife to

entertain neighbors or to venture from home for any reason.

When Arthur was five, the family encountered great stress. Prussia annexed

Danzig, and, shortly before the advancing Prussian troops arrived under the command of

the very general Heinrich had insulted years before, the entire Schopenhauer family fled

to Hamburg. There, in a strange city, Johanna gave birth to her second child, Adele, and

felt ever more trapped and despairing.

Heinrich, Johanna, Arthur, Adele—Father, mother, son, daughter—the four bound

together yet unconnected.

To Heinrich, Arthur was a chrysalis destined to emerge as the future head of the

Schopenhauer mercantile house. Heinrich was the traditional Schopenhauer father; he

attended to business and put his son out of mind, intending to spring into action and

assume fatherly duties when Arthur had finished his childhood.

And the wife, what was Heinrich`s plan for her? She was the Schopenhauer family

seedpod and cradle. Dangerously vital, she had to be contained, protected, and restrained.

And Johanna? What did she feel? Trapped! Her husband and provider, Heinrich,

was her lethal mistake, her joyless jailer, the grim evacuator of her vitality. And her son,

Arthur? Was he not part of the trap, the seal to her coffin? A talented woman, Johanna

had a desire for expression and self–realization that was growing at a ferocious pace, and

Arthur would prove a woefully inadequate recompense for self–renunciation.

And her young daughter? Little noticed by Heinrich, Adele was assigned a minor

role in the family drama and was destined to spend her entire life as Johanna

Schopenhauer`s amanuensis.

And so the Schopenhauers each went their separate ways.

Father Schopenhauer, heavy with anxiety and despair, lumbered to his death,

sixteen years after Arthur`s birth, by climbing to the upper freight window of the

Schopenhauer warehouse and leaping into the frigid waters of the Hamburg canal.

Mother Schopenhauer, sprung from her matrimonial trap by Heinrich`s leap,

kicked the grime of Hamburg from her shoes and flew like the wind to Weimar, where

she quickly created one of Germany`s liveliest literary salons. There she became the dear

friend of Goethe and other outstanding men of letters, and authored a dozen best–selling

romantic novels, many about women who were forced into unwanted marriages but

refused to bear children and continued to long for love.

And young Arthur? Arthur Schopenhauer was to grow up into one of the wisest

men who ever lived. And one of the most despairing and life–hating of men, a man who

at the age of fifty–five would write:

Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners

condemned not to death but to life and as yet all too unconscious of what their

sentence means. Nevertheless every man desires to reach old age...a state of life of

which it may be said «it is bad today, and every day it will get worse, until the worst

of all happens.»