The Tragedy of the White Queen

Two thousand five hundred years ago, defying the logic of conventional wisdom and the evidence of the senses, Buddhism opened a new door to understanding with the realization of the impermanent, temporary nature of worldly objects. Buddha’s enlightenment included the recognition of the way humans create their own suffering through misguided desire for transient things.

From a different place, time, culture, and world view, we are given a similar insight:

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun.

- Ecclesiastes 2:11

Reflecting on a life of personal attainment, this Old Testament author awakens to the disappointing truth of the ultimate meaninglessness of striving for things that are as insubstantial as a breeze.

Despite the warnings and admonitions of religious teachings, the cause of suffering is rarely understood or accepted. So we continue to make the same tragic mistakes over and over. It is as if we have fallen into a deep pit that we cannot escape, frantically grasping for emotional and material elements that cannot support us. Yet occasionally a contemporary real-life story demonstrates the truth of how people unwittingly devise their own suffering.

Some years ago, an article in San Francisco Magazine, titled “Larger than Death,” documented the events that led to the suicide, at age 45, of Ella King Torrey, former president of the San Francisco Art Institute. Torrey took the challenging job in 1995, taking over the well-respected school that was both underfunded and in need of energy and vision. She was supercharged, bringing boundless overwhelming enthusiasm, ideas, and focused ambition to her work. Torrey delighted in meeting creative and influential people, going out of her way to bring them together, forming innovative and ingenious networks. She was inspired by “making things new, creating something out of nothing,” as she said. And she was a terrific fund-raiser, increasing the Institute’s annual donations four hundred percent, from $500,000 to $2.5 million. She spent lavishly as well, on visiting artists, a variety of building projects, exhibitions, student grants, and a significant expansion of the Institute’s library.

When donations dried up at the end of the dot-com bubble, the Institute’s Board discovered a huge financial deficit. Torrey, as president, took the blame and was fired. Twelve months later, following a difficult year of feeling lost and depressed, she ended her own life without leaving a note. Her friends and colleagues were dumbfounded, not comprehending how someone with such purpose and such an appetite for the exciting life - fine food and wine, beautiful things, color, laughter, friends - could end her own.

The source of this tragedy can be traced to Torrey’s seeing herself in a limited way, strictly as a woman who was successful, glamorous, and constantly in the spotlight, doing terrific things that were enthusiastically applauded. Her firing destroyed her desperately held image of herself. She had defined who she was by what she believed she had obtained and what she felt she had to obtain. But it was an image of herself she saw, not her true self. It was an image dependent upon grasping for and holding on to things of the world that have no permanency, that by their constantly changing nature cannot be held.

I have an image of Ella Torrey living life as the white queen in a chess game - in charge, having the capacity to make the most powerful moves. When the game took a surprising turn, the queen was sacrificed; the game continued but she could no longer play. Not having an inner vision of who she was, believing that the game with her as queen was all there was, left her feeling empty and without purpose or meaning in life. It was a life lived externally, without intimacy, without self reflection.

The tragedy of Ella Torrey was her inability or unwillingness to stop the rush to grasp for what is “out there.” Perhaps the rush was what fueled her creativity and excitement, but her story warns us that we put ourselves at risk for suffering - and tragedy - when the rush is all we know.

Dogen, the founer of Soto Zen, wrote in the thirteenth century:

To study Buddhism is to study the self,
To study the self is to forget the self,
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things

Ella Torrey was unable to study herself, to contemplate the purpose of her life beyond the transient successes of the everyday world. She did not realize that her inherent true self was not diminished by the unfortunate turn of events at the Art Institute. Perhaps if she had allowed herself to be enlightened by all things rather than grasping for them, she could have had a more balanced life that did not end in self-inflicted tragedy.