What We Stay Alive For

Robin Williams, Ethan Hawke, a sweaty-toothed madman, and how we heal each other.

When I started my post from a few days ago about The Extremely Unreliable Critic, I’d originally intended for it to end differently than it did, with a different point to be made. But the muse took hold and the words went the direction that they went and instead I found myself writing about the universal psycho-cosmic thunderdome all of us enter as people trying to engage in any sort of creative act. I like where it ended up.

But I want to revisit Ethan Hawke’s beautiful talk about giving yourself permission to be creative that began that whole thing.

And before I get into Hawke’s talk, first I want to talk about something else it brings to mind, a movie Hawke starred in more than 30 years ago: 1989’s Oscar-winning The Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams as teacher John Keating some 25 years before Williams died from suicide. I mention that because it adds some weight to what we’re talking about here, and because it drives home the point Hawke is going to make for us by the end of this post.

* * *

In Dead Poets, Hawke appears as Todd Anderson, a pupil at prestigious all-boys prep school Welton Academy in Vermont. His assigned roommate, Neil Perry (played by Robert Sean Leonard), is a senior and one of the most impressive and accomplished students at the school.

Together they take an English class taught by Williams’ Keating character.

Keating has his students read the first page of a book about studying poetry, in which a Dr. J. Evans Prichard blasphemously creates a method for charting the greatness of poems, on an actual graph, like math.

“Excrement,” Williams declares. “I want you to rip out that page … and not just that page, but the entire introduction. I want it gone. History! Leave nothing of it! Rip it out! Rip! … It’s not the Bible. You’re not gonna go to hell for this! Make a clean tear. I want nothing left of it!”

So then they do, with Williams chanting, “Rrrrip it out! Rip! Rip!”

After a brief interruption from a stodgy school administrator, they resume. “Keep ripping, gentlemen!” Williams commands. “This is a battle! A war! And the casualties could be your hearts and souls! Armies of academics, going forward measuring poetry. No! We will not have that here. No more Mr. J. Evans Prichard. My class will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language.”

And then he says, “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world … I see that look in Mr. Pitts’ eye, like 19th-century literature has nothing to do with going to business school and medical school. Right? Maybe. Mr. Hopkins, you may agree with him, saying, ‘Yes, we should simply study our Mr. Prichard and learn our rhyme and meter and go quietly about the business of achieving other ambitions. I’ve got a little secret for ya. Huddle up. Huddle up!”

They huddle up. “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute,” Williams says. “We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion.”

Then Williams delivers the iconic lines: “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

From there Williams goes on to quote a condensed version of Walt Whitman’s “Oh Me! Oh Life!” from Leaves of Grass:

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish …

What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer?

That you are here.

That life exists and identity.

That the powerful play goes on.

And you may contribute a verse.

He repeats the last two lines, then asks the students: “What will your verse be?”

Here’s the scene in full:

As the movie unfolds, Hawke’s Todd Anderson finds himself confronted openly and directly in class one day after choosing not to fulfill a homework assignment to write poem. Keating responds, “Mr. Anderson thinks that everything inside him is worthless and embarrassing. Isn’t that right, Todd? Well, I think you’re wrong. I think you have something inside of you that is worth a great deal.”

Keating then draws a poem out of Anderson in real time, right there in front of everyone.

By the end of the scene, if you were to write out the poem on its own, it would go like this:

A sweaty-toothed madman with a stare that pounds my brain.

His hands reach out and choke me.

And all the time he’s mumbling.

“Truth. Truth is like a blanket

That always leaves your feet cold.”

You push it, stretch it.

It’ll never be enough.

You kick at it,

Beat it,

It’ll never cover any of us.

From the moment we enter crying

to the moment we leave dying,

it will just cover your face

as you wail and cry and scream.

It’s a powerful moment of inspiration that sticks with you long after watching it.

But that’s not even the point of the movie, or at least not entirely.

Also throughout the movie, Anderson’s roommate Neil Perry, likewise inspired by Keating, pursues his true passion of acting, lands a lead role in a school theater performance — and provokes the rage of his father, who’s hellbent on Perry attending Harvard’s medical school upon graduation from Welton Academy.

After his father tells him — the night before his performance — that Perry is forbidden from performing, Perry, in his teenage youth and emotion, finds himself overwhelmed by grief and, unable to understand this or feel safe expressing it to his father, dies from suicide.

This leads to an investigation that ultimately leads to the students in Keating’s class being coerced into signing a document asking for his removal from the school. During a class, as the school headmaster tries to teach the students the pages they ripped from the textbook, Keating appears to gather his things. Hawke’s Todd Anderson climbs up on a desk and performs the first poem Keating taught them in the class, Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain! My Captain!”

* * *

The heartbreaking piece of all this is that Williams took his own life in 2014 at 63 years old after years of suffering from severe depression, which was compounded by a Parkinson’s diagnosis toward the end. His widow said the disease had led to Williams beginning to suffer from increasingly intense paranoia as his brain began to deteriorate.

The way Parkinson’s operates, among other terrible things, it kills off neurons in the brain, specifically neurons responsible for generating dopamine. Someone suffering from depression already lacks a normal amount of dopamine, the chemical that makes us feel pleasure and joy.

Taking into consideration the depression Williams lived with for so long, it stands to reason that the Parkinson’s took his remaining ability to hold onto those things that — to borrow from his Keating character — we stay alive for.

I can’t help but think that all of the beautiful and hilarious stories that Williams gave the world were also one way for him to keep himself alive, especially considering Hawke’s beautiful talk 30 years after Dead Poets Society, about giving yourself permission to be creative.

What Hawke says in 2020 echoes that movie, engaging in the same debate about the value of the things that sustain life versus the things that we stay alive for.

Hawke says:

So you have to ask yourself, do you think human creativity matters?

Well. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right?

Until their father dies. They go to a funeral. You lose a child.

Somebody breaks your heart. They don’t love you anymore.

And all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life. And has anybody ever felt this bad before?

And the inverse! You meet somebody great! And your heart explodes. You love them so much you can’t even see straight. You’re dizzy. Did anybody ever feel like this before? What is happening to me? 

And that’s when art is not a luxury. It’s sustenance. We need it.

There’s a thing that worries me sometimes when we talk about creativity because it can have this kind of feel that it’s just nice, you know?

Or it’s warm. Or it’s something pleasant.

It’s not.

It’s vital.

It’s the way we heal each other.

In singing our songs, in telling our story, in inviting you to say hey, listen to me, and I’ll listen to you. We’re starting a dialogue. And we start to witness each other’s common humanity. And when you do that, this healing happens.”

What Williams’s character told Hawke’s character three and a half decades ago is true forever: if you think that what’s inside of you is worthless, you’re dead wrong.

What you have inside of you is worth a great deal.

It could be the thing that comforts one of us in the dark when we need something more than truth as we wail and cry and scream.