Creatures of a Day
Jarod entered my office and trudged straight to his chair without greeting me. I braced myself.
While staring out the window at strands of fleecy wisteria, he said, “Irv, I have a confession to make.” He hesitated and then suddenly turned to face me directly to say, “This woman, Alicia . . . you remember my talking about her?”
“Alicia? We’ve spoken a great deal about Marie, of course, but no, I don’t remember Alicia. Refresh my memory.”
“Well, there is this other woman, Alicia, and the thing is . . . uh . . . Alicia also thinks I’m going to marry her.”
“Whoa, I’m lost. Jarod, back up, and fill me in.”
“Well, yesterday afternoon, when Marie and I met for our couples therapy session with your Patricia, the shit hit the fan. Marie began by opening her bag, pulling out a sheaf—a very large sheaf—of emails, highly incriminating emails, in which Alicia and I discussed marriage. So I decided I’d better fess up here today. I’d rather you hear this from me than from Patricia. Unless you’ve already talked to her.”
I was stunned. In the year I had been meeting with Jarod, a thirty-two-year-old dermatologist, we had been focusing heavily on his relationship with Marie, his live-in partner for the last nine months. Though he claimed to love Marie, he balked at commitment. “Why should I,” he said more than once, “offer up my one and only life?”
Up to now I had been under the impression that therapy was proceeding slowly but steadily. Jarod had been a philosophy major in college and had originally sought me out because he had read some of my philosophical novels and felt certain I would be the right therapist for him. In the first months of our work together he often resisted therapy through attempts to engage me in abstract philosophical discussions. However, in recent weeks, I saw less of that, and he seemed to have grown more serious and shared more and more of his inner self. Even so, Jarod’s most pressing issue, his problematic relationship with Marie, remained unchanged. Knowing that it was futile to attempt couples work in an individual therapy setting, I had suggested a few weeks earlier that he and Marie see an excellent couples therapist, Dr. Patricia Johnson, whom today, out of the blue, he referred to as “my Patricia.”
How to respond to Jarod’s confession? Several directions beckoned: his crisis with Marie, his having led two women to believe he would marry them, his reaction to Marie’s breaking into his email account, or his comment about “my Patricia” and the fantasies that underlay that. But all these things would have to wait a bit. I considered that my primary task just then was to attend to our therapeutic relationship. That always takes precedence.
“Jarod, let’s go back and explore your very first comment: your statement about needing to make a confession. Obviously you’ve withheld some important things from our work, things that you speak of today only because you believe I’ll hear about them from Patricia. From ‘my Patricia.’”
Dammit, I shouldn’t have added that last bit. I knew it would divert us, but it just popped out.
“Right, sorry about that Patricia crack. I don’t know where it came from.”
“Any hunches?”
“Not sure. I think it’s just that you seemed so keen on her and so effusive in your praise of her ability. Plus she is drop-dead gorgeous.”
“And so you thought there was something going on between Patricia and me?”
“Well, not really. I mean, for one thing, there is a big age difference. You said she was a student of yours about thirty years ago. I did some Internet research and learned she’s married to a psychiatrist, another ex-student of yours . . . so . . . I mean . . . uh . . . tell you the truth, Irv, I don’t know why I said that.”
“Perhaps you may have wished it, wished that you and I were in collusion, that I, like you, was engaged in a problematic affair?”
“Preposterous.”
“Preposterous?”
“Preposterous but . . . ” Jarod nodded to himself a few times. “Preposterous, but probably true. I admit that when I walked in today, I felt exposed and alone, flapping in the breeze.”
“So you wanted company? Wanted us to be co-conspirators?”
“I guess so. Makes sense. That is, it makes sense if you’re psychotic. God, this is embarrassing. I feel like I’m about ten years old.”
“I know this is uncomfortable, Jarod, but try to stay with it. I’m struck by your word ‘confession.’ What does it say about you and me?”
“Well, it says something about guilt. About something I’ve done that I hate to admit. I avoid telling you anything that would tarnish your view of me. I have a lot of respect for you . . . you know that . . . and I very much want you to continue to have a certain . . . uh . . . a certain image of me.”
“What kind of image? What do you want Irv Yalom to think about Jarod Halsey? Take a moment and conjure up a scene in which I am attentive to your image.”
“What? I can’t.” Jarod grimaced and shook his head as though to rid himself of a bad taste. “And anyway what are we doing now? This all seems off the mark. Why aren’t we talking about the important stuff—my tight spot with Alicia and Marie?”
“That, too. Shortly. But humor me for a moment. Continue with our discussion of my image of you.”
“Boy, I can really feel my unwillingness. This what you call ‘resistance’?”
“In spades. I know this feels risky, but do you remember my telling you at our first meeting that it was important to take a risk each session? Now’s the time! Try to risk it.”
Jarod closed his eyes and turned his face toward the ceiling. “Okay, here goes . . . I see you in this office sitting there,” he turned and, with eyes still shut, pointed in the direction of my desk at the opposite end of my office. “You’re busy writing, and for some reason my image drifts into your mind. This what you mean?”
“Exactly. Don’t stop.”
“You close your eyes; you see my face in your mind and take a good long look at it.”
“Good. Keep going. And now imagine my thoughts as I look at your face.”
“You think, Ah, there’s Jarod. I see him . . . ” He seemed more relaxed as he sank into the fantasy task. “Yes, that Jarod, what a fine fellow. So smart, so knowledgeable. A young man of unlimited promise. And so deep, so philosophically inclined.”
“Keep going. What else am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking, What character he has, what integrity. . . . One of the best and brightest men I’ve ever seen . . . a man to be remembered. That kind of stuff.”
“Say more about how important it is that I have this image of you.”
“Of paramount importance.”
“It seems like it’s more important for me to have this image of you than for me to help you change, which, after all, is the purpose of your consulting with me.”
Jarod shook his head, resigned. “After what’s gone down today, it’s damned hard to refute that.”
“Yes, if you withhold crucial information from me, like your relationship to Alicia, it must be so.”
“Point taken. Believe me, the absurdity of my position is all too evident.”
Jarod slumped in his chair, and we sat briefly in silence.
“Share what’s passing through your mind.”
“Shame. Mainly shame. I was ashamed to admit to you that I might not marry Marie when you . . . we . . . put in all that hard work together after Marie’s cancer diagnosis and mastectomy.”
“Keep going.”
“I mean, what kind of a prick leaves a woman who has cancer? What kind of man betrays and abandons a woman because she has lost one of her tits? Shame. A lot of shame. And to make it worse, I’m a doctor: I’m supposed to care about people.”
I began to feel some real sorrow for Jarod and spotted an impulse bubbling up in me to protect him from the wrath of his self-accusations. I wanted to remind him that his relationship to Marie was troubled long before she was diagnosed with cancer, but he was now in such decisional crisis that I feared saying anything he might interpret as advice. I have known too many patients in such a state who provoke others, including their therapist, to make their decision for them. In fact, it seemed likely to me that Jarod was covertly prodding Marie to make the decision to break off their relationship. After all, how did she discover those email messages? He must have unconsciously colluded with her; otherwise why hadn’t he trashed and deleted that correspondence?
“And Alicia?” I asked. “Can you fill me in about you and her?”
“I’ve known her a few months. Met her at the gym.”
“And?”
“Been seeing her a couple of times a week in the daytime.”
“Oh, can you give me a little less information?”
Perplexed, Jarod looked up at me, noted my grin, and smiled. “I know, I know . . . ”
“You must feel jammed up. This is an awkward and painful predicament. You come to me for help, but you’re reluctant to speak openly.”
“‘Reluctant’ is putting it delicately. I absolutely hate talking about this.”
“Because of influencing the image I’ll have of you in my mind?”
“Yes, because of that image.”
I pondered Jarod’s words for a few moments and then decided on an unorthodox strategy—one that I had rarely ever used in a course of therapy.
“Jarod, I happen to have been reading Marcus Aurelius recently, and I’d like to read you a few of his passages that seem pertinent to our discussion. Do you know his work?”
Jarod’s eyes immediately filled with interest. He welcomed this respite. “Used to. I read his Meditations in a college course. I was a classics major for a while. But I haven’t read him since.”
I walked over to my desk to fetch my copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and started flipping through the pages. For the past few days I had been reading and highlighting passages because of an unusual interaction with another patient, Andrew. At our session the previous week Andrew had expressed, as he had done so many times before, his anguish at spending his life in a meaningless vocation. He worked as a high-salaried advertising executive and hated such meaningless goals as selling Rolls-Royce sedans to women wearing Galliano evening gowns. But he felt he had no choice: with advanced emphysema likely to shorten his productive work years, he needed the income to pay for his four children’s college tuition and to care for his ailing parents. I surprised myself when I suggested to Andrew that he read The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I hadn’t read Marcus Aurelius for many years, but I did recall that he and Andrew had something in common: Marcus Aurelius, too, had been forced into a vocation not of his own choosing. He would have preferred to be a philosopher, but he was the adopted son of a Roman emperor and was ultimately chosen to succeed his father. So instead of a life of thought and learning, he spent most of his adult years as an emperor fighting wars to protect the Roman Empire’s borders. However, in order to maintain his own equanimity, Marcus Aurelius dictated, in Greek, his philosophical meditations to a Greek slave, who entered them into a daily journal meant only for the emperor’s eyes.
After that session, it occurred to me that Andrew was so diligent he would, without doubt, do a close reading of Marcus Aurelius. Hence, I had to reacquaint myself immediately with The Meditations, and I spent much of my spare time in the previous week savoring that second-century Roman emperor’s powerful, poignant words and preparing myself for the next session with Andrew, whom I was to see shortly after Jarod.
This was all in the back of my mind when I met with Jarod, and as he spoke of longing for his image to flicker forever in my brain, I grew persuaded that he, too, might be transformed by some of the ideas of Marcus Aurelius. At the same time I doubted my own inclinations: I had on many occasions observed that, whenever I read any of the great life-philosophers, I invariably sensed their relevance to many of the patients I was currently seeing and couldn’t help citing some ideas or passages I had just stumbled on. Sometimes it was useful, but often not.
While Jarod waited, somewhat impatiently, I scanned the passages I had highlighted. “This will take just a few minutes, Jarod. I’m certain there are passages here that will be of value to you. Ah, here’s one: ‘Soon you will have forgotten all things: soon all things will have forgotten you.’
“And here’s the one I was thinking of,” I read aloud while Jarod closed his eyes, apparently in deep concentration. “‘All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.’
“And this one too: ‘Swiftly the remembrance of all things is buried in the gulf of eternity.’”
I put down the book. “Any of these hit home?”
“What’s the one starting with ‘All of us are creatures of a day?’”
I reopened the book and read again:
All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.
“Not sure why, but that one sent some shivers down my back,” Jarod said.
BINGO! I was delighted. Just what I had hoped for. Maybe this was an inspired intervention after all. “Jarod, put other thoughts aside, and focus on that shiver. Give it a voice.”
Jarod closed his eyes and appeared to sink into a reverie. After a few moments of silence, I again prodded him. “Reflect on this thought: All of us are creatures of a day: the rememberer and the remembered alike.”
Slowly Jarod, eyes still closed, responded. “Right now I have a crystal-clear memory of my first contact with Marcus Aurelius. . . . I was in Professor Jonathan Hall’s class in my sophomore year at Dartmouth. He asked me for my reactions to Part 1 of The Meditations, and I posed a question that surprised and interested him. I asked, ‘Who was the intended audience of Marcus Aurelius?’ It is said that he never intended for others to read his words and that his words expressed things he knew already, so to whom exactly was he writing? I recall my question launching a long, interesting class discussion.”
How annoying. How very annoying. How typical of Jarod to attempt to involve me in an interesting but distracting discussion. He was still trying to embellish my image of him. But over my year of work with him I had learned that it was best not to challenge him at times like this but, instead, to address his question directly and then gently guide him back to the issue.
“As far as I know, the scholars have felt that Marcus Aurelius was repeating these phrases to himself primarily as a daily exercise to bolster his resolve and to exhort himself to live a good life.”
Jarod nodded. His body language signified satisfaction, and I continued, “But let’s return to the particular passages I cited. You said you were moved by the one that began: ‘All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike.’”
“Did I say I was moved? Perhaps I did, but for some reason it leaves me cold now. Honestly, right now, tell you the truth, I don’t know how it applies to me.”
“Maybe I can help by recalling the context for you. Let’s see, ten, fifteen minutes ago, when you described the importance of my having a certain image of you, it occurred to me that certain Marcus Aurelius statements might be illuminating for you.”
“But how?”
How irritating! Jarod seemed oddly obtuse today—ordinarily he had such a nimble mind. I considered commenting on his resistance but ruled that out because I had no doubt he would have a clever rebuttal and it would slow us down even more. I continued to plod along. “You place great importance on my image of you, so let me read the beginning of this one again: ‘All of us are creatures of a day: the rememberer and the remembered alike.’”
Jarod shook his head, “I know you’re trying to be helpful, but these stately pronouncements seem so off the mark. And so bleak and nihilistic. Yes, of course we are but creatures of a day. Of course everything passes in an instant. Of course we vanish without a trace. That’s all pretty obvious. Who can deny it? But where’s the help in that?”
“Try this, Jarod: keep in mind that phrase ‘The time is at hand when all will have forgotten you,’ and juxtapose that to the vast importance you place upon the persistence of your image in my mind, my very mortal, evanescent, eighty-one-year-old mind.”
“But Irv, with all respect, you’re not offering a coherent argument. . . . ”
I could see Jarod’s eyes sparkling with the prospect of an intellectual debate. He was in his element as he continued, “Look, I’m not arguing with you: I accept all is ephemeral. I have no pretense of being special or immortal. I know, like Marcus Aurelius, that eons of time have passed before I existed and that eons will go on after I cease to be. But how does that possibly bear on my wish for someone I respect, in other words, you, to think well of me during my brief time in the sun?”
Yikes! What a blunder to have tried this. I could hear the minutes clicking by. This discussion was eating up the whole session, and I felt pressed to salvage some part of our hour together. I always teach my students that, when you’re in trouble in a session, you can always bail yourself out by calling on your ever-reliable tool, the “process check”—you halt the action and explore the relationship between you and the patient. I heeded my own advice.
“Jarod, can we stop for a moment and turn our attention to what’s going on between you and me? How do you feel about the last fifteen minutes?”
“I think we’re doing great. This is the most interesting session we’ve had for ages.”
“You and I do share a delight in intellectual debate, but I have grave doubts that I’m being helpful to you today. I had hoped that some of these meditations would shed light on the importance of your desire for me to have a positive image of you in my mind, but I now agree with you that this was a harebrained notion. I suggest we just drop it and use what little time remains today to address the crisis you’re facing with Marie and Alicia.”
“I don’t agree it was harebrained. I think you were right on. I’m just too rattled now to think straight.”
“Even so, let’s go back to how things stand right now with you and Marie.”
“I’m not sure what Marie is going to do. All this just happened this morning, and right after the session she had to get back to a research meeting in her lab. Or at least that’s what she claims. Sometimes I think she fabricates excuses not to talk.”
“But tell me this: What do you want to happen between the two of you?”
“I don’t think it’s up to me. After what’s just happened, it’s her call right now.”
“Perhaps you don’t want it to be your call. Here’s a thought experiment: Tell me, if it were up to you, what would you want to happen?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.”
Jarod shook his head slowly, and we sat in silence for the last minutes of the hour.
As we prepared to end, I commented, “I want to underscore these last few moments. Keep them in mind. My question is: What does it mean that you don’t know what you want for yourself? Let’s start from that question next session. And, Jarod, here’s one more thought to ponder during the week: I’ve got a hunch there’s a connection, maybe a powerful connection, between your not knowing what you want and your powerful craving for your image to persist in my mind.”
As Jarod stood to leave, I added, “You have a lot going on now, Jarod, and I’m not sure I’ve been helpful. If you’re feeling pressed, call me, and we’ll find a time to meet again this week.”
I was not pleased with myself. In a sense, Jarod’s confusion was understandable. He came to see me in extremis, and I responded by becoming professorial and pompous and reading him arcane passages from a second-century philosopher. What an amateurish error! What was I expecting? That simply reading Marcus Aurelius’s words would, presto, magically enlighten and change him? That he would immediately realize that it was his own image of himself, his own self-love, that mattered, not my image of him? What was I thinking? I was embarrassed for myself and certain he left my office far more confused than when he had entered.
***
I had an hour-and-a-half break before my meeting with Andrew and put aside my thoughts about Jarod in order to read as much Marcus Aurelius as I could before seeing Andrew. The more I read, the more uncomfortable I grew because I had yet to come upon even one single mention of Marcus Aurelius expressing disgruntlement about his job and his longing for another life as a philosopher. Yet the very reason I had suggested to Andrew that he read the Meditations was that he and Marcus Aurelius shared a life predicament of being locked into a job they did not want. I began to dread our meeting: the prospect of yet another Marcus Aurelius fiasco loomed. My only hope was that Andrew had been too busy to take my suggestion seriously and forgotten all about Marcus Aurelius.
But it was not to be. As Andrew jauntily entered my office, I spotted a well-bookmarked copy of Marcus Aurelius in his hand, and my heart sank. I braced myself as Andrew took his seat.
He began immediately: “Irv, this book,” waving The Meditations at me, “has changed my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I cannot find the words to express my gratitude.
“Let me tell you what’s happened since our last session. After I left your office, I stopped down the street at the City Lights bookstore and bought a copy of The Meditations, and the following morning I flew to New York to pitch our company for the account of a huge resort chain and gave, in my view, an excellent presentation in the evening. The next morning, just as I was boarding the plane to return home, I got an email on my iPhone from our new young CEO who had been present at my talk. He reminded me of a few additional important points I might have made in my pitch. Well, I totally lost it, and just before takeoff, I shot back an angry email telling him he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about and that he was free to search for someone who could do my job better. Fuming, I settled into my seat, slowly calmed down, and then spent the entire flight reading Marcus Aurelius. Five and a half hours later, I got off the plane a changed man. When I reread the CEO’s email, I viewed it quite differently: it was basically a positive letter that politely made a couple of well-thought-out suggestions for my next talk. I phoned him, apologized, thanked him for his suggestions, and we’ve now started a great relationship.”
“Quite a wonderful story, Andrew. Take me back to Marcus Aurelius. How did the book make such a difference?”
Andrew riffled through the heavily underlined pages for a couple of minutes and said, “This whole book is pure gold, but the particular passage that grabbed me was in Part 4. Here it is: ‘Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, “I have been harmed.” Take away the complaint, “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away.’”
“Hmm, I don’t recall that passage. Could you go over it again for me and tell me how it’s been helpful?”
“He writes, ‘Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, “I have been harmed.” Take away the complaint, “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away.’ That’s a core concept for the Stoics. I’ve been studying the text closely, and he makes that exact point in different words a number of times. For example, in Part 12 he writes: ‘Jettison the judgment and you are saved. And who is there to prevent this jettison?’ Or, only a few lines away, here’s one I love: ‘All is as thinking makes it so—and you control your thinking. So remove your judgments whenever you wish and then there is calm—as the sailor rounding the cape finds smooth water and the welcome of a waveless bay.’
“So,” Andrew continued, “what he teaches me is that it is only your own perceptions that can harm you. Change your perceptions, and you eliminate the harm. Nothing from the outside can harm you because you can only be harmed by your own vice. The only way to respond to an enemy is not to be like him.
“Maybe this is simple, but it’s an earth-shaping insight for me! Let me give you an example. Yesterday my wife was extremely stressed and harassed me endlessly for having misplaced a book that she needed. I could feel myself veering toward an explosion of anger toward her until I brought the words of Marcus Aurelius to mind: ‘Remove the judgment “I have been harmed” and the harm is removed.’ I began thinking of all the stress my wife was under—from a crisis at her workplace, from a dying father, from conflicts with our children—and then, instantaneously, the harm vanished, and I was full of compassion for my wife and sailing in the ‘smooth water’ of a ‘waveless bay.’”
Oh what a pleasure it was to be with Andrew! As he taught himself, he taught me too. What a contrast to that vexing hour with Jarod. As Andrew spoke, I sat back and luxuriated in his words and those of Marcus Aurelius.
“Let me tell you something else I’ve learned,” Andrew continued. “I’ve read a lot of philosophy in the past, but I now realize that I’ve always read for the wrong reasons. I read because of vanity. I read for the sake of being able to demonstrate my knowledge to others. This,” Andrew held up his copy of The Meditations, “is the first authentic experience I’ve ever had with philosophy, my first realization that these wise old guys really had something important to say about life, about my life at this moment.”
I finished the session full of humility and wonder. That elusive “aha” experience I had so futilely stalked in my hour with Jarod had, mirabile dictu, effortlessly materialized in my work with Andrew.
***
I didn’t hear from Jarod during the week and was uncertain what to expect at our next session. He arrived right on time, greeted me, and began speaking immediately. “I have a lot to tell you. I almost phoned you a couple of times but managed to survive on my own. A shitload of stuff has gone down. Marie has gone. She left a one-sentence note: ‘I need space to figure out my path and will be at my sister’s house.’ Remember you asked me last time how I would feel if she made the decision to leave? Well, that experiment has now been run, and I can tell you I don’t feel released or liberated.”
“What do you feel?”
“Mostly I feel sad. Sad for both of us. And restless and agitated. After I read her note, I didn’t know what to do. I knew only that I had to get out of our apartment. There was just too much Marie there. So I asked a friend if I could stay at his small cottage in Muir Beach, packed an overnight bag, and spent a three-day weekend there with your Marcus.”
“With my Marcus? That’s a surprise! And? How did the weekend go for you?”
“Good. Maybe even very good. Sorry about last week. Sorry I was so dismissive and closed.”
“You were in a state of shock last week, and, well, to put it mildly, my timing could’ve been better. So you say the weekend was ‘maybe even very good’?”
“More so now. At the time it was painfully dreary. Just being alone like that was an unusual event. I don’t think I’ve ever spent that much time alone just doing nothing except thinking about myself nonstop.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I think I was searching for a bare-bones retreat, something like Thoreau at Walden—though I read somewhere that Thoreau’s mother packed him lunches for his retreats and took care of his dirty laundry. But in search of a real retreat, I made the ultimate sacrifice. I went there naked—no cell phone and no computer. I downloaded and printed out The Meditations before I left and made sure my partners would take all my patients’ phone calls—though, as you probably know, dermatologists get few emergencies, which was one of my reasons for choosing the field. I felt strange without the Internet. I mean, if I wanted to find out about the weather, I actually had to stick my head out the window. So no structure for three days, aside from reading The Meditations slowly. And, oh yes, I had one other task: pondering your assignment, your thought experiment asking me to consider the connection between not knowing what I want and my craving that my image persist in your mind. I spent a big hunk of time on that.”
Ah yes, that thought experiment. I had forgotten all about that, though I didn’t wish to admit it. “So where are you in your thinking about that experiment?”
“I think I’ve found a solution. I’m pretty sure you were implying that I am lacking a self, that I’m looking for me in you, that my hollowness makes it impossible to identify my needs and my desires, and that’s why I didn’t or couldn’t make a decision about Marie and forced her to make the decision—and that’s why I craved some existence in your mind.”
I was stunned. Speechless. For several moments I just looked up at Jarod’s face. Did I know this man? Is this the same Jarod I’d met with for a year? His comments about the thought experiment were by far the most astute and honest comments about himself I had ever heard him utter. How to respond? As always, when I don’t know what to say, I stuck to the truth.
“That thought experiment was a work in progress, Jarod. I didn’t spend much time formulating it and had no definite answer in mind. It simply sprang up as we were ending our session, and I took a chance in telling it to you. My gut told me it might guide you to the right territory, and I think it succeeded. But let me ask something: I’m struck by your commenting that this is what you think I meant, what I thought. Can you own that yourself? What do you think?”
Jarod smiled, “Well, it’s impossible to answer that, isn’t it, because, if I lack a self, then who or what is the entity that’s positing its own nonexistence?”
Oops, there he is again, the old Jarod, full of pratfalls and paradox. I didn’t bite on this one, not for a second. “I don’t recall that you’ve ever spoken before of this feeling of hollowness. That sounds important, and we should spend time exploring that. I’m struck by how much this weekend seems to have affected you. You seem so much more open, more willing to examine your own mind. Tell me, what was there in Marcus Aurelius that catalyzed this change?”
“I knew it! I knew you’d ask that. I’ve been asking myself the same question.” Jarod opened his folder containing the pages of The Meditations and extracted a handwritten page. “Just before I came today I jotted down a few of the passages that made me shiver the most. I’ll read them. They’re in no particular order.”
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.
If any man despises me, that is his problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of contempt.
Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
“I like these very much, Jarod. And, indeed, they do speak straight to the issue we’ve been discussing—that the center of one’s self-esteem and self-judgment should be within yourself rather than in the mind of another—that is, my image of you.”
“Yes, I’m slowly getting the point. Here’s another with a similar message:
“‘If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistakes in any thought or action. I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.’”
Jarod looked up from his page. “Sounds like these were written precisely for me. I have one last one. Shall I read it?”
I nodded. I love being read to, especially when the words are laden with wisdom.
“‘Remember that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes of imperial office are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. . . . Perceptions like that—latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are—that’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.’”
A dynamite passage! It made me shiver, too. And as he read, I thought of how this session was a mirror image of our last one: today he the reader and I the listener.
“I think I know your next question,” said Jarod.
“And that is?”
“To be specific, to tell you exactly how these effected change.”
“You’re right on. Batting a thousand today. Can you take a crack at that one?”
“That seems so logical a question, but I can’t really give you the answer. It just didn’t work like that—it’s not that I read a wise statement and suddenly changed.”
Uh oh, here we were again. As usual, nothing was easy with Jarod. I longed for Andrew, who even without my prompting immediately pointed to the passage and the idea that changed everything for him. Why is Jarod so difficult? Why can’t Jarod, just once, act like Andrew?
“What do you mean, Jarod, ‘It didn’t work like that’?”
“I wrote down passages that had shiver power—passages that shook me up. But I simply cannot make the leap and say these particular words, these very thoughts, changed me. It didn’t work that way. There was no single epiphany. It’s more global. It was the overall process.”
“The overall process?”
“How to put it? Look, I’m blown away by this man’s daily practice of self-scrutiny. Every morning he took himself more seriously than I have ever done any morning in my entire life. I’ve taken him inside of me as a model of how to live. Last week I raised the question, ‘To whom was he writing?’ I understand now. It is obvious that his meditations are messages to his everyday self from that deep part of himself committed to live a good life. I think you implied that. Well, now I want to be able to do that. I admire him tremendously. What else can I say? Well, for one thing, this book, these meditations, make me see, really see, how truly fucked up I am. His meditations led me to understand that my whole life is wrong. I’m resolved to change. This week I’m going to level with both Marie and Alicia and tell them the truth: that I’m not ready for a committed relationship with anyone and that I have a ton of work to do on myself. I’m even reconsidering my professional life. I don’t love what I’m doing, and as I once told you, I think I chose to specialize in dermatology because it was an easier life. I don’t mean to knock my field—I mean that I’m not proud of my reasons for choosing it.”
Jarod paused, and we sat in silence for several moments.
But I wanted to know more. Though I’ve been treating patients for fifty years, I continue to thirst for answers to the question of what really helps.
“Jarod, I understand how you were affected by the overall process, and I’ll do all I can to encourage that process in the future. Nevertheless I still believe there may be some value in considering which of the specific meditations affected you. Can I take a look at the ones you just read to me?”
Jarod hesitated for a moment and then handed me the list.
I sensed his hesitation but decided not to comment on it. I knew what it meant: I was out of tune with him. My need to know is a good thing in that it fuels my interest in my patient, but sometimes, like that moment, it may be a bad thing in that I can’t be satisfied with simply being present in the hour.
After scanning the list I commented, “I’m struck that several of the meditations you selected point to issues of virtue and integrity. They stress that harm can come to you only through your own vice.”
“Yes, throughout the text Marcus Aurelius repeats that virtue is the only good, vice is the only bad. Again and again he makes the point that you, the core you, cannot be hurt if you maintain your virtue.”
“So in other words he is showing you the path to creating a positive image of yourself.”
“Yes, exactly. I heard that message loud and strong: if I’m virtuous and truthful, both to myself and to others, I will take pride in myself.”
“And when you do that, it won’t matter so much to you what image of you I have in my mind. One of my favorite psychiatrists, Karen Horney, wrote that if you want to feel virtuous, you must do virtuous things. It’s a simple and venerable concept, right out of Marcus Aurelius, and Aristotle before him.”
“Right. No more deception. Here with you or anywhere else.”
“Let’s start right now. We’ve still got a couple of minutes today. Let’s use them to check into the feelings you’ve had about me today.”
“Almost all positive. I know you’re on my side and doing your best for me. The only moment when I felt slightly annoyed was when you pressed me about which words of Marcus Aurelius really helped. I felt you were asking me to distort my experience to satisfy your curiosity or corroborate your hunches or maybe to categorize my healing process.”
“Point well taken, Jarod. Very well taken. It’s a good observation and it is something I’ve got to work on.”
***
Before my next patient I had ample time to think about Jarod and Andrew and the extraordinary drama I had witnessed. Once again I felt humbled by the endless complexity of the human mind and despaired at the vacuousness of my field’s attempts to simplify and codify and generate how-to manuals to treat patients in some predesigned collective manner. Here were two patients who dived into a great-souled man’s sea of wisdom, and each found benefit in a different way, in a way that neither I, nor any other mind, could possibly have predicted.
I wondered what this sea held for me as I approached my eighty-second birthday, full of life and passion and curiosity but saddened by the loss of so many people I had known and loved, at times mourning my lost youth, and distracted by my deteriorating scaffolding, my obstinate, creaking joints, my fading hearing and vision, and ever aware of the deepening dusk and relentless approach of the final darkness. I opened The Meditations, scanned the pages, and found the message meant for me:
Pass, then, through this little space of time in harmony with nature and end thy journey in contentment, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.