The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

So much of our lives are determined by the definition of freedom we carry around unconsciously in our heads. On the second mountain it is your chains that set you free.

Once a kid is born you’ve been seized by a commitment, the strength of which you couldn’t even have imagined beforehand. It brings you to the doorstep of disciplined service.

In my experience, people repress bad desires only when they are able to turn their attention to a better desire.

When you serve your child it feels like you are serving a piece of yourself. That disposition to do good is what having good character is all about.

Commitments are the school for moral formation.

When your life is defined by fervent commitments, you are on the second mountain.

These are young people of infinite depth and promise.

had agency and power to change what was happening in my community.

“I do the work because I don’t consider it work. I do it because my mother and grandmother have taught me it is a responsibility to respond.” They do their work in the matter-of-fact way other people do the dishes. There are dishes in the sink so of course they have to be done.

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

giving is the primary relationship between one person and another, not the secondary one.

Their eyes communicate the residue of solitary battles with angels, the costs of caring for others, the deaths of ambition and ego, and the peace that comes from having very little left to lose in this life. They are gentle because they have honestly faced the struggles given to them and have learned the hard way that personal survival is not the point. Their care is gentle because their self-aggrandizement is no longer at stake. There is nothing in it for them. Their vulnerability has been stretched to clear-eyed sensitivity to others and truly selfless love.

And because she kept a journal, we get a glimpse of what the shift from egocentric immaturity to selfless maturity looks like from the inside.

“a weakling and a nonentity adrift and tossed by the waves.”

“fragmented…depressed…a mass of uncertainties…Lack of self-confidence. Aversion. Panic.”

Hillesum remembered him as the man “who attended at the birth of my soul.”

No longer: I want this or that, but: Life is great and good and fascinating and eternal, and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty eternal current that is life. It is in these moments—and I am so grateful for them—that all personal ambition drops away from me, and that my thirst for knowledge and understanding comes to rest, and a small piece of eternity descends on me with a sweeping wingbeat.

She lectured herself to never hate the wickedness of others but to first hate the evil within herself.

“Happiness,” Dr. William H. Sheldon wrote, “is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without reservation or regret.”

But, as he was avoiding writing, he “did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness,” he wrote. “One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism.”

What is life asking of me?

the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them.

“Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?’ Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and perhaps they will reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.”

“The great thing in all education,” William James wrote, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

“The most indispensable viaticum for the journey of life is a store of adequate ideals, and these are acquired in a very simple way, by living with the best things in the world—the best pictures, the best buildings, the best social or political orders, the best human beings. The way to acquire a good taste in anything, from pictures to architecture, from literature to character, from wine to cigars, is always the same—be familiar with the best specimens of each.”

“The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”

When making the big choices in life, as L. A. Paul puts it, “You shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you are getting into.”

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Tversky once said. “The big choices we make are practically random.”

What am I motivated to do? What activity do I love so much that I’m going to keep getting better at it for the next many decades? What do I desire so much that it captures me at the depth of my being?

In choosing a vocation, it’s precisely wrong to say that talent should trump interest. Interest multiplies talent and is in most cases more important than talent.

“Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end.”

A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy.

Gasset believed that most people devote themselves to avoiding that genuine self, to silencing the daemon and refusing to hear it. We bury the faint crackling of our inner fire underneath other, safer noises, and settle for a false life.

“the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.”

First, Is it big enough? Those who have been fortunate to receive a good education, who are healthy, and have had great work experiences should not be solving small problems. If you were born lucky, you should solve big problems.

“Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”

Writing is really about structure and traffic management. If you don’t have the structure right, nothing else will happen. For me, crawling about on the floor working on my piles are the best moments of my job.

One of the best pieces of advice for young people is, Get to yourself quickly. If you know what you want to do, start doing it. Don’t delay because you think this job or that degree would be good preparation for doing what you eventually want to do. Just start doing it.

many artists have trouble disappearing naturally into their lives. They feel separate from others and want to be connected somehow. It’s precisely the lack of social and emotional flow that can propel creativity.

vocation, when lived out to the fullest, connects all things, comes together in one coherent package, overshadows the self, and serves some central good.

Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. Marriage colors your life and everything in it. George Washington had a rather interesting life, but still concluded, “I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one’s life, the foundation of happiness or misery.”

Marriage comes as a revolution. To have lived as a one and then suddenly become a two—that is an invasion. And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life.

“What greater thing is there for two human souls,” George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede, “than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting?”

There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness.”

“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.”

“Whether it turns out to be a healthy, challenging, and constructive crisis or a disastrous nightmare, depends largely upon how willing the partners are to be changed.”

Marriage is, as Lord Shaftesbury once put it, like a gem tumbler. It throws two people together and bumps them up against each other day after day so they are constantly chipping away at one another, in a series of “amicable collisions,” until they are bright.

“No context is love-proof, no convention or commitment impervious. Even a lifestyle which is perfectly insulated, where the personality is controlled, all the days ordered and all actions in sequence, can to its own dismay find that an unexpected spark has landed; it begins to smoulder until it is finally unquenchable. The force of Eros always brings disturbance; in the concealed terrain of the human heart Eros remains a light sleeper.”