Exuberance Review - Page 2

 Jamison’s prose, rich in alliteration and imagery, recalls the character of its expansive subject.  Exuberance: the Passion for Life spirals through history, science, and literature.  A gifted storyteller, Jamison tells of how the enthusiasm and love of nature shared by Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir contributed to the conservation of national forests and wildlife preserves in the early years of the twentieth century.  “Neither was capable of doing nothing when there was much to be done,” Jamison writes.  “Their joy in the wild was contagious to those around them.  Both were persuasive by temperament and able to convince others of what they felt to be a moral imperative.”

She next explores the quieter exuberance found in the nineteenth century snow crystal photomicrographs of Wilson Bentley.  “He was as stricken by their impermanence as struck by their beauty,” she writes.  “He endured the inevitable frustrations and failures involved in capturing and photographing a solitary snow crystal before it melted into nothingness because he felt an urgency that others did not.”  That sense of urgency provided the motivation for him to complete a body of work that to this day still inspires awe, not only by its sheer volume but by its brilliance.

Kay Jamison’s kaleidoscope of examples sparkling and folding in on one another is itself a study in exuberance.  Heads of state mix with naturalists, physicists, and Mr. Toad from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows as the chapters play out.  Michael Faraday, Richard Feynman, James Watson, Winston Churchill, and Tigger of the Hundred Acre Wood are just a few of the personalities she evokes.  What carries the work and prevents the many examples from feeling repetitious is Jamison’s skill as a writer.  Her brisk storytelling style keeps the story moving forward throughout the book.

Those who study the mind, as she notes early on in Exuberance, tend to focus on the darker side.  The reasoning behind this is obvious.  Six years before, in Night Falls Fast, she addressed the depressive states that overcame those who took their own lives.  Profound sadness is destructive.  It is natural to see in it a problem to be solved.  Profound joy needs no remedy, yet there are still questions to be asked.  In 1993, she pressed upon similar questions in Touched with Fire.  Where does creativity come from?  What about genius?  What about those who gave us so much but only in sudden, Roman candle-like, bursts and sprays of brilliance between weeks, months, or years of silence?  “We have given sorrow many words,” she writes in Exuberance, “but a passion for life few.”

The exuberant may more easily rally others to their cause or they may be dismissed as lacking seriousness.  “Joy lacks the gravitas that suffering so effortlessly commands,” she notes.  Still, in groups, the sullen can be far more easily overlooked than the passionate.  The rush of energy and ideas, in the right crowd and circumstances, can be rapidly infectious.  “It is a material part of our pursuits – love, games, hunting and war, exploration – and it is a vibrant force to signal victory, proclaim a time to quicken, to draw together, to exult, to celebrate.” 

Reviewer Jason A. Zwiker is a freelance writer in Charleston, South Carolina.

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