Review of Restless Mind, Quiet Thoughts: A Personal Journal
A Deliberate Life . . . and Death
by Andrea Young-Ward
"I WENT TO the woods because I wanted to live deliberately," wrote Henry David Thoreau 150 years ago. One cannot help but wonder, however, what would happen if he tried to do the same thing today. Restless Mind, Quiet Thoughts is the personal journal of Paul Eppinger, a sensitive young man who ended his life by suicide at 29 years of age. It is a story which takes the reader on a ten-year journey through the mind of a person who found life too painful to live. And it is, in large part, the story of a person who, like Thoreau, attempted to live deliberately in his times. What makes the book so powerful and disturbing is that the story includes not only a deliberate life, but a deliberate death.
Restless Mind, Quiet Thoughts could be likened to reading a real-life mystery. It asks the reader to place blame. After all, a young and beautiful man has died. We must be angry at someone. And the reader enters the mystery with a strong bias. Since the book's cover makes it clear that Paul took his own life, one is eager and ready to point the finger at Paul himself. We merely wait for the opportunity to say of Paul, "If only he had. . ." or "If only he hadn't. . ." But Paul is excruciatingly vigilant of his own weaknesses and does not let us get by with easy answers. He says, for example, that he knows he sometimes indulges in intoxicants to dull the sharp edge of pain with which he lives. He admits he sometimes runs toward his sorrows rather than away. He admits this to his father in his correspondences and to an even more honest critic: himself.
"It is true, so true, that we choose to be lonely; we make the world of alone," he writes. He goes on to explain the reason: "In many ways the experience of being out in the wild is a much more valid lesson in humanity than being in a city. A large city like New York is one hundred percent human-ness; there is nothing else; you are overcome by the totality. In the woods, there is nothing human but you. If something is wrong, out of balance, it can only be you, and your thoughts. The purest human confrontation!"
A little voice gnaws at the reader when he or she reads these words. One almost wants to reprimand him. But for what--introspection? We could not implicate him for searching for himself, could we? Maybe what is troublesome is that most of our society is designed to avoid introspection altogether.
Perhaps part of the book's effectiveness comes from the fact that he did not know he was writing it at the time. Had he known he was making a product, he might have tried to give us some kind of answer or a neatly packaged deal. But Paul would not accept easy solutions for himself--and the book is primarily a dialogue within himself--because they were not real. Life is real, complicated, and without many answers.
Paul's father, Charles, is the only other voice in the book, appearing in the form of correspondence with his son and in Paul's deepest musings. He writes to Paul in one letter: "It isn't sick, it isn't insane to yearn and search for a right feeling, a natural feeling inside as we live our lives and experience our surroundings, our relationships, our work. Rather the 'civilized' world is sick when it pressures us to violate those inner promptings and to force-fit ourselves into accepted forms."
Should we chide Paul's father, Charles, for not telling him a happy fairy tale? Should we blame him for not asking Paul to blank out and swallow meaninglessness? Again, the reader is struck by a relationship far more honest than the context of its society.
Paul constantly pushed the limits of meaning and existence. Like Thoreau who wrote, "I certainly have to try then to squeeze something meaningful from my presence. . . ," Paul tried to, and to an excruciating degree did, live life deliberately. But what is troublesome about this book is that it is not just about living. Paul's suicide is the inevitable end of this story, a looming face which beckons and weighs on us as only mortality can.
And whenever we try to point the finger of blame to account for the death, Paul gently and unintentionally points our fingers back at ourselves. He says, without meaning to, what would you do if you were me? He forces us to walk miles--not just in his shoes, but in the skin which always felt too constricting for his spirit.
We admire and praise Thoreau as the spirit of what is brave and independent. But he lived in a different time. If he were to come back today, how would he live his life in this world?
Paul writes, in speaking about his father, "At times he can be very hard to be with; one has no choice but honesty." Ironically, this is exactly what is so difficult about reading this book: one has no choice but honesty. The reader has no choice but to confront the deepest questions which face the human soul: life, death, meaning and meaninglessness, beauty and purpose. To be or not to be. In reading Restless Mind, Quiet Thoughts, one must look into one's own soul and ask whether it is possible to live as deliberately as Paul died.
© 1995 Andrea Young-Ward
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