Love Conquers All--Including Despair

The invitation from the speakers’ bureau read, “Say what you would say if you had only one more lecture to give.” But some principle of superstition had always held me back from giving “The Last Lecture.” Suppose immediately after delivering it I keeled over?

In 25 years of college teaching, there were quite a few things I wanted to say that I had never said to my classes. There was a year when, given this opportunity, I would have talked to the students about Life. I would have given them the summing up that the topic called for, and if that wisdom seemed bitter or cold, so be it.

In that gloomy year, I wanted to tell a roomful of eager students that boredom was a major motive in human affairs. I wanted to vent my discovery that serious issues seriously debated were often only games, and that people in public and private life hid their motives--from each other and themselves. Deception and self-delusion were everywhere. Love, the supreme illusion, was the name we gave our greatest need.

Into these large opinions fed small complaints. Rudeness seemed to be pervasive. The kid at the information booth, when asked where the museum was, had pointed to a wall in back of him without looking up from his book. The restrooms in my college building were dirty. My son’s karate teacher had skipped town, several lessons owing. Around me, things seemed in decline.

Anger of Middle Years

No, I was not an old fogy, but I did suffer from the anger of the middle years. Everywhere I saw self-promotion, isolation, indifference. The whole world was getting a divorce, and so was I.

In this black mood I was the universe’s least likely person to do what most of my newly single friends did: look for a partner. But of course I did. I traveled the singles’ circuit, attended workshops on meditation and discussed in successive weeks the benefits of expressing emotions and the advantages of controlling them.

One Friday evening, I found myself at yet another singles’ dance. A brief talk, “Charting Your Financial Course by the Stars,” had taken place. The host of this event, a smiling fellow, had given us all, the young and the middle-aged, a quick disco lesson. I had danced with a sullen-looking woman who declared that she never went anywhere to meet a new person. The burly man whose voracious consumption of cookies I had noted at other events was telling me that he lived at the local Buddhist monastery. An old, sweet-faced man was doing a polka to a sultry woman’s rock ‘n’ roll. The week before he had told me “in confidence” that he didn’t know how to dance.

I looked around. I was as out of step as he. The thought that I would never meet anyone here, and that I was a fool for having come, seized me like a pain.

As I made my way to the front door, a handsome young man pushing a wheelchair came through. The young woman in the chair looked weak, her color matching her long beige dress. With the greatest caution, as if he were lifting something expensive and precious, the man drew her upright. She leaned forward, her arms around him, her body inert but not without grace. He rocked her slowly back and forth, and she rocked on her own as well. His beat quickened, and the motion of her upper body did too. She never moved her feet, but her body seemed supple in his arms. When the music stopped, he lowered her in the chair, and she smiled at him, blushing. Calmly he maneuvered the chair to the refreshment table and poured her a glass of wine, and when she was done, he just as calmly wheeled her out of the hall.

Blinded to Kindness

No one gave any sign of looking. If people looked, they didn’t stare.

I headed for the exit. For once, the coatroom’s unholy chaos did not annoy me. Nor did the piece of bright green gum stuck to the wall by someone too impatient to dispose of it in a more conventional way. I walked to my car and thought that in my irritation with dirty public facilities, in my anger over people’s self-promotion, in my despair over human callousness, I had blinded myself to the kindness and selflessness that were all around me.

And that couple--who could believe in the impossibility of love after seeing these two?

I am glad that I did not give The Last Lecture and pronounce that convenience underlies our morality or that anger triumphs over shared concerns, for at best these things would have been only half true.

Of course, I did not meet anyone at the dance that night. But some sense of possibility was healed, some belief in love restored--along with the realization that despair and depression sometimes need just one more day, one more experience, to be overcome.