Who lives life to the fullest?

In the routinized commotion of my middle age I have the opportunity sometimes to think through how I got here and what is likely to come in the years ahead. At the moment life is stable. Stability is, of course, a good thing, because it is conducive to being able to handle a situation where there are bills to pay, kids to raise, a mortgage, car payments and other similar demands - some insistent and some not. Stability also seems to be a tailor-made state for people in their forties. A routine, with no major surprises or crises, is perfectly suitable for someone with substantial responsibilities and a sense that they have to be taken care of.

Parents raising children usually want them to achieve that sense of responsibility and the ability to construct a routine aimed at meeting the obligations. Reaching that point is often considered "success" -- becoming a productive member of society. But it's a very pedestrian accomplishment, and certainly nothing that gains much recognition or approbation. And why should it? By definition, it's unremarkable.

Here in New York there used to be an expression used by the cool, up-to-the-minute folk who lived and partied in Manhattan: "bridge and tunnel people." They were referring to the souls who had to actually cross a river to get to Manhattan. Nowadays the neighborhoods have changed, and plenty of artsy types and artsy-type-wannabes live across the East River in places like Williamsburg or Red Hook in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens or Hoboken in New Jersey. These areas used to be war zones, but now are very desirable places to live. So I don't know if the beautiful types still use the term to refer to the rest of us. But that sense among the "in" set that they are unique still undoubtedly prevails, even if they now have to cross a river to get to Manhattan - and what is unique about them, or at least what they seem to believe makes them unique, is that they don't hold down the humdrum jobs, don't commute and don't fit the normal pattern of bourgeois life. That very refusal to accept the normal demands of middle-class life is their self-proclaimed badge of honor and distinction. They think it shows they are living life more fully and authentically than the mass of plodders out there beyond the Hudson.

What is it that they were claiming to be experiencing? What great secret thrill were they feeling that the rest of us couldn't understand or even observe? Honestly, I don't know. So this could be just some form of snobbery or an attempt to create a clique. But at least on the surface it claims to be a group having unique ability to live and experience, to taste every facet of life in a way that other people can't.

Believe it or not, I started thinking about this because of Harry Potter. The actor who plays Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, created a stir by taking on the main character's role in the revival of the play Equus in London. The stir has to do with the fact that the role requires Radcliffe to be naked at one point. That's not what got me thinking, though. It was Equus that got me thinking. The movie version of Equus, which starred Peter Firth in the role that Radcliffe is going to play, came out about ten years ago. It was based on the play, of course. The playwright was Peter Schaffer, who had also written Amadeus. Both plays deal with a slightly abnormal central character. In Equus the character had created for himself what amounted to a religion based on horses. He was an otherwise unremarkable boy in his late teens, but in his room he would engage in highly elaborate and intensely ecstatic rituals paying homage to horses. The rituals would transport him and gratify him.

Amadeus was based loosely on the life of Mozart. Its premise is that Mozart was a genius at creating music but, in everyday interaction, he was an uncivilized misfit. Both plays speak to the nature of intense experience: can a human being have intense experiences, whether of genius or ecstasy, and still live normally as a member of society?

I wonder about this often. Many people I know are deeply religious. They pray with intensity - or seem to - and when I watch them praying, their faces seem to reflect a certain spiritual gratification. They take their religion seriously. They feel it. Others I know have political or ideological commitments, and I do mean commitments. Everyone has his or her preferences, about all sorts of things, but these people really get passionate about their causes, be they environmentalism, prisoners' rights or what-have-you. It's almost like their drug.

I have never felt anything like that. I have never felt transported or seized by any abstraction. I simply don't get very excited about very much, and certainly not by concepts. I'm pretty smart but certainly not an off-the-charts genius, and I can't think of any particular talent I have in which I can lose myself. For a very long time I thought I was missing out on something. It was almost like I was observing life rather than living it. That detachment hasn't been so terrible - it has enabled the stability I posted about up top, and it has made me quite practical. Also rather tolerant and analytical. But does it mean I'm getting out of life the most that I can?

I can't believe I'm alone in this. It doesn't make intuitive sense to me that most people are committed passionately to some abstract cause or are regularly transported by spiritual reverie. Nor does it seem to me that they should be. Passionate commitment is predictably a source of conflict. And if Peter Shaffer is right, it also can bring with it some serious personal instability. Is it possible to have a unique talent like Mozart, or an intense passion like the character in Equus without also being strange?