Soul Friends by Stephen Cope

Author:Stephen Cope
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2017-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Lao-tzu says that when we slip over that line from friend to enemy, we lose our own “treasure.” Sadness is the appropriate response to the defeat of a noble adversary. The sadness of General Grant at the surrender of General Lee. The sadness of Richard the Lionheart on hearing the death of his worthy opponent, Saladin. The sadness of Charles Darwin as he watched Fitzroy’s decline.

22

By all means, let us not demonize Admiral Fitzroy. In his later years, Fitzroy made heroic contributions to science, and especially to meteorology, inventing the very concept of weather forecasting. He created ingenious systems to get weather information to sailors and fishermen for their own safety. Among sailors Fitzroy became a hero, and his weather forecasts saved countless lives. Fitzroy was always a creature of perseverance as best he knew it: devotion to duty. But alas, his was perseverance without flexibility or fluidity—the very traits Darwin had mastered.

Meanwhile, Fitzroy had split from the sources of his deepest connection. And this inevitably split his psyche down the middle. He could not reconcile these dueling parts of himself. (This kind of internal war is Freud’s very definition of neurosis and mental suffering.)

By April 1865, Fitzroy found himself in a pit of despair. For five years he had brooded over Origin. He had recently lost the post of Chief Naval Officer in the Marine Department to an ambitious subordinate. He was overworked. His health was failing. His hearing was going. And he had gradually become caught up in one of his own inner storms of depression. On Sunday, April 30, Fitzroy kissed his daughter, walked into his bathroom, locked the door, and slit his throat—exactly as his mother’s half brother, Lord Castlereagh, had done in 1822. It was the very fate Fitzroy had dreaded and had tried to avoid all those years earlier when he’d invited the young Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle to be his friend and companion.

Darwin was devastated. As ever, he saw the nobility in Fitzroy. He saw the good. His final statement on the matter was eloquent in its perspective and clear-sightedness.

I never knew in my life so mixed a character. Always much to love & I once loved him sincerely; but so bad a temper & so given to take offence, that I gradually . . . wished only to keep out of contact with him. But certainly there was much noble and exalted in his character.

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