The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (28 page)

EIGHT

Mark was my best friend in college. The only friend, really, who remained a constant presence in my life long after graduation day. We were close right up to the time of his tragic death at the age of forty-four.

Mark and I didn’t really “get” each other until sophomore year, when he lived across the hall from me in an ancient, battle-scarred dorm at the center of the Amherst College campus. I say we didn’t “get” each other right away. In fact, as a freshman, Mark scared me. He was a kind of campus celebrity—charming, skillfully extroverted, handsome, and (at least I imagined, and he later denied) popular with the whole cross-section of Amherst society—from jocks to intellectuals. Remember: I had just trucked in from the cornfields of Ohio, and I was awed by the tony (and still all-male) world of Amherst College. I was much less well prepared—both socially and intellectually—than all those boys who had been to elite New England prep schools. I spent most of my waking time trying to just fit in. Mark didn’t have to try. He
was
in. He occupied center stage naturally and without pretense.

The headline of Mark’s obituary in
The New York Times
read, “Mark Stevenson, Actor.” But I always thought it should have said poet. He was a poet at heart. He dressed like a poet. Spoke like a poet. In fact, before we became friends I had heard around campus that Mark identified with the poet John Keats—and later, when we became close, he sometimes
mused with me about his hunch that he might actually be a reincarnation of Keats. How exotic.

But who
was
John Keats, anyway, I thought. And who were these guys who at eighteen years of age were already so knee-deep in life that they could identify themselves with such a luminary? Of course, I had no idea who
I
was, or who I wanted to be. I tended to corral myself with the other freshmen who were also obviously at sea in this elite new world, and were quietly crying homesick tears into their pillows at night. (I could sniff out these boys: that deer-in-the-headlights look. This was my tribe in freshman year.)

It took me the whole of freshman year to stop holding my breath. When I arrived back at Amherst for sophomore year, everything looked different. I had had a construction job all summer. I had—miraculously—added almost an inch and a half of height since my first day at Amherst a year earlier. I was muscled and tan. I’ll never forget driving onto campus that fall. Amherst looked for the first time like a place I could call home. I was not going to just survive this year, I said to myself. I was going to thrive. And as I settled into my dorm room, there was Mark Stevenson—rooming right across the hall from me. My luck had turned. Mark and I became friends that very day. And throughout the fall, we got into the habit of taking long walks in the New England woods surrounding the village. We hiked the nearby Holyoke Range together. By late October we were sitting at the top of Memorial Hill late into the night, sharing our adolescent secrets.

I continued to watch Mark in awe. But now I watched him up close. I watched throughout the next three years, as he went on being more and more himself—passionate about his many pursuits, and not particularly caring what others thought of him. At some point—after he had pledged one of the most elite fraternities—he decided, apparently, to
live
like the John Keats he thought he might be. He decorated his room like that of an eighteenth-century lord, complete with suits of armor and tapestries (where on earth did he find them?). He called me Cope, as if we were scholars at Oxford. He created around him an aura of another world. To live with Mark was to live inside a great drama.

2

There are aspects of our lives that we can never fully understand without the perspective of age. When I was a graduate student, studying psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a mentor of mine said, “Psychoanalysis is to help the patient acknowledge, experience, and bear reality.” Yes, I thought. This made sense. But then he added a line that I did not really understand at the time: “And to put it all into perspective.”
Acknowledge, experience, and bear reality. And put it into perspective
. Much of the developmental work of middle and old age is precisely about putting experience into perspective—about understanding perhaps for the first time what one’s life really means.

Mark’s story has only come into perspective for me deep into middle age. In fact, I don’t think I ever fully appreciated Mark until I began to study the life of John Keats. As much as Mark had tried to educate me about Keats (oh, all that poetry he read aloud at night in our dorm room, and quoted by heart on our walks on the Holyoke Range), I never really
got it
. I realize now that one cannot understand Mark—or anyone—without understanding his exemplars, his mentors, his heroes.

In the last ten years, I have indulged a fascination with Keats. And, strangely perhaps, this has happened in large part as a result of my interest in the Bhagavad Gita. When I started studying the Gita, I just couldn’t get Keats out of my mind. Vague memories from college began to haunt me. And then I realized:
Keats was a man who was in love with his dharma
. The idea of dharma was the key to understanding Keats’s life!

At the age of eighteen, in 1813, John Keats discovered what he called his “vocation to poetry.” Keats—celebrating the miracle of finding his calling—wrote in an early attempt at a long poem, “
O, for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed.” I began to understand Mark’s fascination with this guy.

From the first moments of the discovery of his dharma, John Keats was aware of a willingness to let himself be “used” by his calling. “
The genius of poetry,” he said at the tender age of nineteen, “must work out its own salvation in a man.” (Who understands these things at the age of nineteen?) Within six years of trying his hand at poetry, Keats would
have written some of the most brilliant verse in the English language. Soon after that he would be dead.

Keats was living his dharma, to be sure. But it gets even more exciting than that. He independently discovered—out of necessity—the pillars of The Doctrine of Inaction in Action. He was
letting himself be used by his dharma
. He had stumbled onto the secret of “not the Doer” (a central principle of dharma that we will explore later on). In his very short but intense life, Keats had intuited many of the most central teachings of the Gita, and had put them to work for himself. His greatness is based on these very discoveries.

As I dug into Keats’s life, Mark’s story, too, began to haunt me. After graduate school, Mark had gone on to write a one-man play about Keats, entitled
This Living Hand: A Visitation from John Keats
, which he performed for many years in New York and around the United States and Europe. I wondered how deeply Mark himself—through his association with Keats—had wandered into dharma territory. Perhaps he, too, had really understood The Doctrine of Inaction in Action. This was an exciting thought for me: Perspective can at times bring exhilaration.

I rummaged around in my photo albums, and pulled out pictures of Mark—not only from college, but also from our many adventures together during our thirties and forties. I found a photo of Mark standing on a mammoth rock jutting out into the ocean in northern Rhode Island, taken while we were on a summer bicycling trip. His head is tossed back, his shoulder-length blond hair blowing in the ocean breeze. I hung the picture over my writing desk.

And then I realized it for the first time: Mark looked remarkably like Keats. I mean—astonishingly. Both were short of stature and compact—handsome, blond, with beautiful smiles and chiseled features. How could I have missed this? Joseph Severn, one of Keats’s closest friends, had once described Keats as seeming taller than his true height because of his erect bearing, and a “
characteristic backward toss of the head.” I looked again at the picture: There it was in Mark. The backward toss of the head. Severn also described “
a particularly dauntless expression, such as may be seen on the face of some seamen.” Mark, again. Reincarnation? Really?

Having gone this far, I knew that I had to know everything about
Keats’s journey. I dug into biographies and collections of his poetry in search of his dharma story.

It’s easy to be put off while reading about great lives. We tend to read them backward, and inevitably to gild them in the process. We read Keats through the prism of his fame, his final few poems. But what happens if you read Keats’s life forward—the way it actually unfolded?

Read this way, Keats is a much more interesting character. He’s courageous. He’s tragic. He died at twenty-five—penniless and almost entirely alone in a foreign land—of a ravaging and wasting disease. He and his work were mostly unknown when he died. By the time of his death, he had published only a few slim volumes of poetry—much of which was really not that good—but some of which was the most phenomenal and daring verse yet to be written in English.