Willpower

hunch, which would prove correct). No one knew, because even the fearsome Arab slave traders had been intimidated by tales of bellicose cannibals downstream.
    Before heading down that river, Stanley wrote to his fiancée, telling her that he weighed just 118 pounds, having lost 60 pounds since seeing her. His many ailments included another bout of malaria, which had him shivering on a day when the temperature in the sun hit 138 degrees Fahrenheit. He expected worse hardships ahead, but he didn’t focus on them in the last letter he would be able to dispatch until reaching the other side of Africa. “My love towards you is unchanged, you are my dream, my stay, my hope, and my beacon,” he wrote to her. “I shall cherish you in this light until I meet you, or death meets me.”
    Stanley clung to that hope for another thirty-five hundred miles, taking the Lady Alice down the Congo River, surviving attacks from cannibals chanting a war cry of “Niama! Niama!”—Meat! Meat! Only half of his companions completed the journey to the Atlantic coast, which took nearly three years and claimed the life of every European except Stanley. Upon reaching civilization, Stanley eagerly sought love letters from his fiancée, but instead he got a note from his publisher with some awkward news (and dubious use of the exclamation point): “I now come to a delicate subject which I have long debated with myself whether I should write about or wait for your arrival. I think however I may as well tell you at once that your friend Alice Pike is married!” Stanley was distraught to hear that his dream woman had abandoned him (for the son of a railroad-car manufacturer in Ohio), and he was hardly mollified by a note from her congratulating him for the expedition while breezily mentioning her marriage and acknowledging that the Lady Alice had “proved a truer friend than the Alice she was named after.” To Stanley, the engagement was further proof of his romantic ineptitude. He had obviously crossed Africa with the wrong woman’s photograph next to his heart.
    But however badly it turned out, Stanley did get something out of the relationship and that photograph: a distraction from his own wretchedness. He may have fooled himself about her loyalty, but he was smart during his journey to fixate on a “stay” and a “beacon” far removed from his grim surroundings. It was a more elaborate version of the successful strategy used by the children in the classic marshmallow experiment. Those who kept looking at the marshmallow quickly depleted their willpower and gave in to the temptation to eat it right away; those who distracted themselves by looking around the room (or sometimes just covering their eyes) managed to hold out. Similarly, paramedics distract patients from their pain by talking to them about anything except their condition, and midwives try to keep women in labor from closing their eyes (which would enable them to focus on the pain). They recognize the benefits of what Stanley called “self-forgetfulness.” He blamed the breakdown of the Rear Column on their leader’s decision to stay put in camp so long, waiting and waiting for additional porters, instead of setting out sooner into the jungle on their own journey. “The cure of their misgivings & doubts would have been found in action,” he wrote, rather than “enduring deadly monotony.” As horrible as it was for Stanley going through the forest with sick, famished, and dying men, their journey’s “endless occupations were too absorbing and interesting to allow room for baser thoughts.” Stanley saw the work as a mental escape:
    For my protection against despair and madness, I had to resort to self-forgetfulness; to the interest which my task brought.... I had my reward in knowing that my comrades were all the time conscious that I did my best, and that I was bound to them by a common sympathy and aims. This encouraged me to give myself up to all neighbourly offices, and was morally fortifying.
    This talk of “common sympathy” and “neighbourly offices” may sound suspiciously self-serving coming from someone with Stanley’s reputation for aloofness and severity. After all, this was the man renowned for the coldest greeting in history: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Even Victorians found it ridiculously stiff for two Englishmen meeting in the middle of Africa. But what’s most revealing about the famous line, according to Jeal, is that Stanley never