The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

These community builders are primarily driven by desires four through six—by emotional, spiritual, and moral motivations: a desire to live in intimate relation with others, to make a difference in the world, to feel right with oneself. They are driven by a desire for belonging and generosity.

These people are somewheres, not anywheres, localists not cosmopolitans.

“A person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged,” writes the philosopher Susan Wolf.

Community is woven through love-drenched accountability.

The lesson is that you have to stay in the conversation long enough; you have to listen patiently enough.

One task in life is synthesis. It is to collect all the fragmented pieces of a self and bring them to a state of unity, so that you move coherently toward a single vision.

Wordsworth, in other words, had to endure a period of drift while waiting to settle into his groove in life, the way most of us do.

The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep. But then the messy way it happens in actual lives doesn’t feel holy at all; just confusing and screwed up.

To feel wonder in the face of beauty is to be grandly astonished.

The best thing about an annunciation moment is that it gives you an early hint of where your purpose lies. The next best thing is it rules out a bunch of other things. “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,” Walker Percy observes.

Any book or lecture can tell you how to do a thing. But in any craft, whether it is cooking or carpentry or science or leadership, there are certain forms of knowledge that can’t be put into rules or recipes—practical forms of knowledge that only mentors can teach.

By thrusting us face-to-face with excellence, mentors also induce a certain humility. They teach us how to humbly submit to the task.

mentors teach how to embrace the struggle—that the struggle is the good part.

later seized by Goethe, called the daemonic. A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy.

When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. You are trying to enact the same fall that is the core theme of this book—to fall through the egocentric desires and plunge down into the substrate to where your desires are mysteriously formed.

Simple questions help you locate your delight. What do I enjoy talking about?

A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you.

If you want to achieve the level of mastery, you have to learn the skill so deliberately that when the knowledge is stored down below, it is perfect.

Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself.

Passion peaks among the young, but marriage is the thing that peaks in old age. What really defines the happy marriage is the completeness of a couple who have been together for decades.

In their book The Good Marriage, Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee estimate that in about 15 percent of marriages the passion never wanes. The women in these marriages, they write, tended to come from families where the father was the more nurturing parent and the mother somewhat cold.

The maximal marriage is something you hurl yourself into, burning the boats behind you. “We must return to an attitude of total abandonment,” Mike Mason writes in The Mystery of Marriage, “of throwing all our natural caution and defensiveness to the winds and putting ourselves entirely in the hands of love by an act of will. Instead of falling into love, we may now have to march into it.”

“If two spouses each say, ‘I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,’ you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.”

Great marriages are measured by how much the spouses are able to take joy in each other’s victories.

Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted. At the far end, when done well, you see people enjoying the deepest steady joy you can find on this earth.

Love starts as a focusing of attention. The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.

Most of the time the dance of mutual unveiling stops at a certain shallow level. Some people feel a tendency to skate through a hundred relationships that don’t involve intimacy. They haven’t yet come to themselves and don’t want to. They are estranged from their inner lives. “My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me,” Garry Shandling used to joke.

Combustion is the phase when you finally see the other person at full depth.

But couples don’t realize what their central disagreement is until they are in it. Sometimes the disagreements are deep and moral or philosophical. But some of the most troublesome ones can be superficial but devastating. Sometimes it is time (he’s prompt, she’s late), or money (she’s thrifty, he’s profligate), or neatness (she’s neat, he’s sloppy), or sex (he likes it every day, she likes it every week), or communication (he’s a bottler, she’s a spiller), but it’s going to surface, and when it does, blood will flow.

There are some people so lug-headed that you have to break up with them before they realize how much they need you. There are some people so attachment averse they have to taste abandonment to get over their fear of engulfment.

Love decenters the self. It teaches us that our riches are in another. It teaches us that we can’t give ourselves what we truly need, which is somebody else’s love. It smashes the walls of ego and leaves a pile of jagged stones.

“The unrelated human being lacks wholeness,” Carl Jung wrote, “for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘you.’

Love is hunting for bigger game than happiness. Love is a union of souls.

Being in a bad marriage will increase your chance of getting sick by 35 percent and shorten your life span by an average of four years. There is no loneliness so lonely as the loneliness you feel when you are lying there loveless in bed with another.

society is a massive conspiracy to distract you from the important choices of life in order to help you fixate on the unimportant ones.

D. H. Lawrence once wrote, “You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath.”

If you marry without total admiration and rapture, you will not have enough passion to fuse you together in the early days, and you will split apart when times get hard.

Settling seems realistic, but only a love built on rapturous devotion is pragmatic in the end.

People disproportionately marry people with their own attachment style.

the Big Five personality traits matrix. The Big Five are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. When

Marriage educates by throwing a series of difficult tasks in your path. Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee list

To separate emotionally from the family of one’s childhood To build intimacy combined with some autonomy To embrace the role of parents and absorb the impact of “Her Majesty, the Baby’s” arrival To confront the inevitable crises of life To establish a rich sexual life To create a safe haven for the expression of difference To keep alive the early idealized images of each other

The quality of the conversation is the quality of the marriage. Good conversation creates warmth and peace, and bad conversation creates frigidity and stasis. Conversation is how marriage partners rub off on each other.

Divorce doesn’t generally happen when the number of conflicts increases; it happens when the number of positive things decreases.

Masters also learn never to sulk. Sulking consists of feeling angry about something but determined not to communicate about it.

Swamp negative interactions with the five love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and personal touch.

There is something beautiful about somebody who stands against the tides on behalf of some idea and yells Change!

There is an old saying that if you catch on fire with enthusiasm people will come for miles to watch you burn.

The hard part of intellectual life is separating what is true from what will get you liked.

ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires.