The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (13 page)

Walt Whitman began the Civil War in a deep depression. His career as a poet had burst into the national consciousness in 1855—just six years before the war ignited—with the publication of
Leaves of Grass
. Emerson immediately hailed
Leaves
as the “
launch of a great career.”

Its opening stanzas were strange, breathtaking.

The poem startled readers with an earthy American voice, singing of “the teeming, energetic, inventive masses,” and of America’s spirit of resilience and nobility. Its pulse was loose, free, and frankly erotic.

Leaves of Grass
was more than a book of poetry. It was a declaration of the possibilities of American democracy, and the spirit of the individual that democracy sustains. Whitman was a mystic, yes. But he was a new kind of mystic: a mystic of the people.

The times in which Whitman wrote, however, were perilous, and the spirit of Whitman’s poetry soon stalled. In the years immediately after the publication of
Leaves of Grass
, the nation spiraled toward civil war, and Whitman himself—even after his initial triumph—was caught in a personal slough of despond. He spent his nights carousing and cruising with his fellow Bohemians in New York’s Greenwich Village, and drinking at the notorious Pfaff’s beer cellar. He frequented the New York Free Love league in his spare time. He hung out with (and probably slept with) tough young men from the docks and coach houses. All the while, he lived in an attic room in his mother’s home, which, though filled with affection, was also saturated with addiction and mental illness.

During the day, Whitman was underemployed variously as a newspaperman and editor. And when not carousing with the handsome coach drivers on the streets of Manhattan, he obsessively edited and revised
Leaves of Grass
. Whitman was stuck. Stuck in his own past. And stuck in a vision of the country that he vastly preferred to the reality he saw around him. His dharma—so potent just a few years before—had dried up under his feet.

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Dharma callings are more fluid than we would like them to be. These callings can change maddeningly. Just when we settle into a satisfying moment of dharma flowering, the world upends us. Just when we think we have gotten our due reward in a stretch of good dharma road, the car skids off into a ditch.

Katherine, our friend the girls’ school dean—not at all unlike Whitman—found herself suddenly shipwrecked after a long stretch of smooth sailing. A once-electrifying vocation had become unaccountably stale, used up, finished. She discovered, like Whitman, that brilliant careers can turn into golden handcuffs. Used up as they may be, they’re still hard to leave behind.

Katherine, you will remember, was indeed handcuffed to a worn-out calling. “It’s all I can do to drag myself out of the bed in the morning,” she told me. “How did this happen? I pictured myself in this job till they carried me out—growing old as the wise elder of the school.”

The tortured clinging to an earlier expression of The Gift very often precedes the emergence of some new version. We’re aware of the dryness at the center, yes, but this aridity is usually not quite enough to propel us forward. We must first get just a
whiff
of the new. The surprising and intoxicating whiff of a new dharma is quite irresistible.

Katherine, alas, had not yet sniffed out the new. Walt Whitman was about to.

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Walt Whitman’s whiff of his new dharma was characteristically dramatic.

The American Civil War ignited in 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The North was galvanized into action by this event. Soon afterward, Whitman’s brother George enthusiastically enlisted in the rapidly gathering Union Army. Whitman and his family were now intimately involved in the young war—through George—and they anxiously scanned the newspaper accounts of battles, paying worried attention to the lists of wounded and dead. In mid-December of
1862, their worst fears were realized. The
New-York Tribune
carried a list of casualties at the bloody battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and there appeared on the list one “G. W. Whitmore, Company D.”

Could this G. Whitmore really be George Whitman? Walt packed a few clothes, notebooks, and fifty dollars in cash—his household’s entire cash reserves—and left for Washington. He was forty-seven years old. His life was about to change.

Walt Whitman spent several desperate days searching for his brother in hospitals all over Washington, D. C. He finally located the very-much-alive—and apparently indestructible—George (who would go on to survive a full twenty Civil War battles). George had been wounded in one cheek, yes, but mildly so, and he had already returned to his regiment. Whitman found him resting comfortably in his tent at the winter encampment.

The search for George had been productive in ways Walt Whitman had not anticipated. It gave him his first exposure to the suffering in Civil War hospitals. And it was during this time that he had his first taste of ministering to wounded and dying soldiers. He found himself drawn to the suffering of these young men, and he began to visit them—to do what he could to salve their torment. In a letter home, he described it:

Whitman began to visit the hospitals regularly, drawn by the possibility that he could do some good for “the boys.” This was not the result of any high-minded scheme to do good. He simply had allowed events to take their course—a character trait that had always been part of Whitman’s genius, and that he wrote about at length in
Song of the Open Road
. Whitman noticed what drew his interest—and then, footloose as he was, he allowed himself to go with it. Today we might call this “going with the flow.” The flexibility in Whitman’s personality allowed him to attune with surprising dexterity to a wholly new vocation. Careful attunement to dharma will demand that we reinvent ourselves periodically
throughout life. Whitman, as it turned out, was a master at self-reinvention.

Whitman’s own journals tell the story of one of his first patients: Private John Holmes. Holmes was a twenty-one-year-old soldier from Bridgewater, Massachusetts—a shoemaker by trade. He had seen action at the Battle of Antietam, where he managed to avoid being wounded. But he had nonetheless become victim of the biggest stealth killer of the war: diarrhea. The disease afflicted over half of all Union soldiers. It was a nightmare to suffer through, and for many Civil War soldiers it resulted in a slow, wasting death.

Holmes had suffered a ghastly series of mistreatments at the hands of inept Union medical personnel, until he finally collapsed at Washington’s Campbell Hospital, where Whitman found him. Whitman was alarmed by “
his glassy eyes, with a look of despair and hopelessness, sunk low in his thin, pallid-brown young face.”

“
I sat down by him without any fuss,” Whitman later wrote in his journal, “talked a little; soon saw that it did him good; led him to talk a little himself; got him somewhat interested; wrote a letter for him to his folks in Massachusetts … soothed him down as I saw he was getting a little too much agitated, and tears in his eyes; gave him some small gifts and told him I should come again soon.”

Whitman began to see that his mere presence, his tenderness, his attention, had an enormous healing effect. He ministered faithfully to Holmes for weeks and Holmes eventually recovered his health completely and rejoined his unit. But as he left the hospital, John Holmes told Whitman that he believed without question that Whitman had saved his life.

Whitman had found a new calling—a calling for which he didn’t even know he was searching. He described it to his brother Jeff: “
I cannot give up my Hospitals yet,” he wrote. “I never before had my feelings so thoroughly and (so far) permanently absorbed, to the very roots, as by these huge swarms of dear, wounded, sick, dying boys.”

As it turned out—and as is so often the case in these matters—his whole life had been a preparation for this dharma. It was a calling that used all of him—itinerant poet, nurse, surrogate father, mother, brother, angel. And being a poet by nature, Whitman soon found precise words
for his new calling. He inscribed it on the front of the notebook he would carry throughout the rest of the war: “Walt Whitman, Soldier’s Missionary.”

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