More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Brooks
Read between
June 18 - June 28, 2022
Writing it was my attempt to kick myself in my own rear, part of my continual effort to write my way to a better life. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,”
We are like beggars who try to show other beggars where we found bread.
What seems to be “me” doesn’t stop at the fixed boundary of my skin.
You have to lose yourself to find yourself, give yourself away to get everything back.
“So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.”
Joy is not a self-standing emotion, he concludes. It is the crown of a well-lived life.
Happiness is the proper goal for people on their first mountain. And happiness is great. But we only get one life, so we might as well use it hunting for big game:
If you do something completely crazy you will know forever after that you can handle a certain amount of craziness, and your approach to life for all the decades hence will be more courageous.
Comparison is the robber of joy.
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,”
Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.
You begin to view yourself not as a soul to be uplifted but as a set of skills to be maximized.
“Character” is no longer a moral quality oriented around love, service, and care, but a set of workplace traits organized around grit, productivity, and self-discipline.
Work, the poet David Whyte writes, “is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself.”
what these people are going through: acedia. This word is used much less frequently today, which is peculiar since the state it describes is so common. Acedia is the quieting of passion. It is a lack of care. It is living a life that doesn’t arouse your strong passions and therefore instills a sluggishness of the soul, like an oven set on warm. The person living in acedia may have a job and a family, but he is not entirely grabbed by his own life. His heart is over there, but his life is over here. Desire makes you adhesive. Desire pushes you to get close—to the person, job, or town you love.
...more
What does it profit a man to sell his own soul if others are selling theirs and getting more for it?
Tolstoy was sick of life and saw no point in it. He was in the valley.
Wealth and fame and accomplishment do not spare anybody from the valley.
For some people this feeling is not a dramatic crisis. It’s just a creeping malaise, a gradual loss of enthusiasm in what they are doing. The Jungian analyst James Hollis had a patient who explained it this way: “I always sought to win whatever the game was, and only now do I realize how much I have been played by the game.”
there I was, a couple of years after college, bitter from the fact that I had thrown away the chance to get an education, working a job that meant nothing to me, my career essentially dead in the water, my self-belief in ruins, with no idea what I wanted to do or where I should go next.”
Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.”
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
Seasons of suffering kick us in the ass. They are the foghorns that blast us out of our complacency and warn us we are heading for the wrong life.
The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upsets the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were. It smashes through the floor of what you thought was the basement of your soul and reveals a cavity below, and then it smashes through that floor and reveals a cavity below that.
Finally, suffering shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency, which is an illusion that has to be shattered if any interdependent life is going to begin. Seasons of pain expose the falseness and vanity of most of our ambitions and illuminate the larger reality of living and dying, caring and being cared for.
The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge.
From the agony of the valley, to the purgation in the desert, to the insight on the mountaintop.
At the moment when you are most confused about what you should do with your life, the smartest bet is to do what millions of men and women have done through history. Pick yourself up and go out alone into the wilderness.
You see that you are called to go toward solitude, prayer, hiddenness, and great simplicity. You see that, for the time being, you have to be limited in your movements, sparing with phone calls, and careful in letter writing….The thought that you may have to live away from friends, busy work, newspapers, and exciting books no longer scares you….It is clear that something in you is dying and something is being born. You must remain attentive, calm, and obedient to your best intuitions.
“What happens when a ‘gifted child’ finds himself in a wilderness where he’s stripped of any way of proving his worth?”
“What does he do when there’s nothing he can do, when there’s no audience to applaud his performance, when he faces a cold, silent indifference, if not hostility? His world falls to pieces. The soul hungry for approval starves in a desert like that. It reduces the compulsive achiever to something little, utterly ordinary. Only then is he able to be loved.”
suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.
“As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.”
As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, “Your ego prefers certainty to uncertainty, predictability over surprise, clarity over ambiguity. Your ego always wants to shroud over the barely audible murmurings of the heart.” The ego, says Lee Hardy, wants you to choose a job and a life that you can use as a magic wand to impress others.
It’s at this point you realize you are a much better person than your ego ideal. It’s at this point when you really discover the heart and soul.
We’re defined by what we desire, not what we know.
“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
The soul is the piece of your consciousness that has moral worth and bears moral responsibility. A river is not morally responsible for how it flows, and a tiger is not morally responsible for what it eats. But because you have a soul, you are morally responsible for what you do or don’t do. Because you have this essence inside of you, as the philosopher Gerald K. Harrison put it, your actions are either praiseworthy or blameworthy. Because you have this moral piece in you, you are judged for being the kind of person you are, for the thoughts you think and the actions you take.
“I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my 75 years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained.”
“My fit of illness had been an avenue between two existences,” he wrote, “the low-arched and darksome doorway, through which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death, too, it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have rid myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad highway.”
“the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.”
You don’t have to be in control. You don’t have to impress the world. You’ve got the skill you earned on the first mountain and the wisdom you earned in the valley, and now is the time to take the big risk. “The sowing is behind; now is the time to reap,” the theologian Karl Barth writes. “The run has been taken; now is the time to leap. Preparation has been made; now is the time for the venture of the work itself.”
“When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds.”
The lesson is that the things we had thought were most important—achievement, affirmation, intelligence—are actually less important, and the things we had undervalued—heart and soul—are actually most important.
We are capable of great acts of love that self-interest cannot fathom, and murderous acts of cruelty that self-interest cannot explain.
“Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”
Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.
Our commitments give us our identity. They are how we introduce ourselves to strangers. They are the subjects that make our eyes shine in conversation. They are what give our lives constancy and coherence. As Hannah Arendt put it, “Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to achieve the amount of identity and continuity which together produce a ‘person’ about whom a story can be told; each of us would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of his own lonely heart, caught in its ever-changing moods, contradictions, and
...more
Our commitments allow us to move to a higher level of freedom. In our culture we think of freedom as the absence of restraint. That’s freedom from. But there is another and higher kind of freedom. That is freedom to. This is the freedom as fullness of capacity, and it often involves restriction and restraint.
You have to chain yourself to a certain set of virtuous habits so you don’t become slave to your destructive desires—the desire for alcohol, the desire for approval, the desire to lie in bed all day.
