Composing a Further Life

have, from previous lives. And I found this way of thinking to be extremely satisfying.”
    My comment was “You don’t have to deal with everything this time around.” But this seems to me now to be an oversimplification—a reason why the exploration of possible past lives might reduce stress in this life but only part of the story of why the concept rings true for so many people. It is interesting that surveys taken over the years say roughly one in five Americans believes in reincarnation. 11 I suspect that many common experiences—for instance, déjà vu—contribute to this belief, but it also seems to connect with the way memories are retained and unrealized possibilities remain with us. Perhaps vivid childhood nightmares of being a slave or a refugee, along with cherished ambitions of being an astronaut or a concert pianist, blend in with the past we carry with us, joining the different versions of ourselves at different life stages. Philosophers have speculated from time to time that worlds are multiplied by each decision, continuing simultaneously along divergent paths.
    Michael seemed to be telling me that for him self-knowledge involved coming to terms with multiple narratives that he knew had not taken place in this life but that felt somehow relevant to the life he had lived, while for me the effort to understand others and the ways in which they compose their lives involves being willing to enter into their worlds with curiosity and respect. Through empathy and imagination we all live multiple lives.
    Three months after this session with Michael Crowe, Jane Fonda came to stay with me while we interviewed each other for our respective books, and it occurred to me that another way people experience multiple lives is in theater, so I asked her how the very diverse parts she had played lived on for her. “In my life, nothing gets left behind,” she said. This led into a discussion of acting and the Method derived from the work of Stanislavsky, in which she was trained. All past experience is a resource for the Method actor, a basic repertoire that allows her to connect with people in profoundly different situations, thinking herself into their lives. Fear, anger, and loneliness as well as love and laughter are there in reserve. If a part requires grief, the actor searches back through earlier experiences—a pet that died when he was four years old or the recent death of a friend—and speaks his lines out of that remembered emotion until the two fuse and he is no longer making stock gestures to represent grief or delight but out of the recalled experience letting his voice and his body—perhaps flooded with adrenaline or filled with contentment—express the feelings.
    At times we all call up past emotions to deal with a present situation, remembering what it feels like to be brave when in danger or conjuring optimism. If I can remember what it feels like to be a “winner,” perhaps others will hear it in my voice, perhaps my own responses will change and I can be one. If I can evoke the young woman I once was, my step becomes lighter. So, for instance, we see salesmen feeling their way into the conviction that they are about to make a big sale, a conviction that may sweep the customer along. If I find I am tensing up before beginning to address a roomful of strangers, I imagine myself greeting someone I love who has been absent and then try to extend that feeling to everyone in the room.
    This process offers a curious mirror image of the effect of rituals and recurrent symbols. Every wedding evokes my own wedding, every funeral evokes the deaths of people I have loved, and the tears that come to my eyes sometimes when I am reading or watching a movie do not belong to any single time or place. Many people as they grow older—I am one of them—find that their emotions are closer to the surface, and this can be either liberating or embarrassing, depending on whether they have learned in the course of life that they should keep a stiff upper lip or have gained the opposite conviction, that responding with feeling to those around them is good.
    I had sought out Michael and Dan in the expectation that they would help me understand the strength we call hope and the different ways in which people confront an unknown future. It seemed to me that Michael was describing a way of drawing strength for the present from the past, that foreign country of an infinite number of possible futures. Michael’s