Read Online The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin Yalom - Free Book Online Page A

concerned with the end of life. (A faint smile played on his lips as Philip held up the dog-eared book.) I recommend these pages to anyone intending to die.
    Julius heard the strike of matches as two students lit cigarettes while exiting the auditorium.
    When death came to claim him, Thomas Buddenbrooks was bewildered and overcome by despair. None of his belief systems offered him comfort--neither his religious views which had long before failed to satisfy his metaphysical needs, nor his worldly skepticism and materialistic Darwinian leaning. Nothing, in Mann's words, was able to offer the dying man "in the near and penetrating eye of death a single hour of calm."
    Here, Philip looked up. "What happened next is of great importance and it is here that I begin to close in on the designated subject of our lecture tonight."
    In the midst of his desperation Thomas Buddenbrooks chanced to draw from his bookcase an inexpensive, poorly sewn volume of philosophy bought at a used book stand years before. He began to read and was immediately soothed. He marveled by how, as Mann put it, "a master-mind could lay hold of this cruel mocking thing called life."
    The extraordinary clarity of vision in the volume of philosophy enthralled the dying man, and hours passed without his looking up from his reading. Then he came upon a chapter titled "On Death, and Its Relation to Our Personal Immortality" and, intoxicated by the words, read on as though he were reading for his very life. When he finished, Thomas Buddenbrooks was a man transformed, a man who had found the comfort and peace that had eluded him.
    What was it that the dying man discovered? (At this point Philip suddenly adopted an oracular voice.) Now listen well, Julius Hertzfeld, because this may be useful for life's final examination....
    Shocked at being directly addressed in a public lecture, Julius bolted upright in his seat. He glanced nervously about him and saw, to his astonishment, that the auditorium was empty: everyone, even the two homeless men, had left.
    But Philip, unperturbed by his vanished audience, calmly continued: I'll read a passage from Buddenbrooks. (He opened a tattered paperback copy of the book.) "Your assignment is to read the novel, especially part nine, with great care. It will prove invaluable to you--far more valuable than attempting to extract meaning from patients' reminiscences of long ago.
    Have I hoped to live on in my son? In a personality yet more feeble, flickering, and timorous than my own? Blind, childish folly! What can my son do for me? Where shall I be when I am dead? Ah, it is so brilliantly clear. I shall be in all those who have ever, do ever, or ever shall say "I"--especially, however, in all those who say it most fully, potently, and gladly!...Have I ever hated life--pure, strong, relentless life? Folly and misconception! I have but hated myself because I could not bear it. I love you all, you blessed, and soon, soon, I shall cease to be cut off from you by all the narrow bonds of myself; soon that in me which loves you will be free and be in and with you--in and with you all.
    Philip closed the novel and returned to his notes.
    Now who was the author of the volume which so transformed Thomas Buddenbrooks? Mann does not reveal his name in the novel, but forty years later he wrote a magnificent essay which stated that Arthur Schopenhauer was the author of the volume. Mann then proceeds to describe how, at the age of twenty-three, he first experienced the great joy of reading Schopenhauer. He was not only entranced by the ring of Schopenhauer's words, which he describes as "so perfectly consistently clear, so rounded, its presentation and language so powerful, so elegant, so unerringly apposite, so passionately brilliant, so magnificently and blithely severe--like never any other in the history of German philosophy," but by the essence of Schopenhauerian thought, which he describes as "emotional, breathtaking, playing between violent