The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

That’s the crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain. Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self?

As Annie Dillard put it, how you spend your days is how you spend your life.

A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.

Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace.

If you can’t focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life?

Suffering teaches us gratitude. Normally we take love and friendship for granted. But in seasons of suffering we throw ourselves on others and appreciate the gifts that our loved ones offer. Suffering puts you in solidarity with others who suffer. It makes you more sympathetic to those who share this or some other sort of pain. In this way it tenderizes the heart. Suffering calls for a response. None of us can avoid suffering, but we can all choose how we respond to it. And, interestingly, few people respond to suffering by seeking pleasure. Nobody says, I lost my child, therefore I should go out and party. They say, I lost my child, and therefore I am equipped to help others who have lost their child. People realize that shallow food won’t satisfy the deep hunger and fill the deep emptiness that suffering reveals. Only spiritual food will do that. Many people respond to pain by practicing generosity. 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.

“The teacher, that professional amateur,” the critic Leslie Fiedler once wrote, “teaches not so much the subject as himself.”

Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.

You can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.

Laughter is the reward for shared understanding.

All pride is competitive. All pride contains a hint of malice. All pride is bloated and fragile, because the ego’s attempts to establish security through power, money, status, intellect, and self-righteousness are never quite successful.

Just as old couples become more like each other over time, the person who spends years hearing and responding to God’s company becomes more like Him, at the secret level, the places only God can see.

The word “sin” is now mostly used in reference to dessert. But if you want to talk about the deepest journey, you need words like “sin,” “soul,” “degradation,” “redemption,” “holiness,” and “grace.” If you want to have some conception of life on a vertical axis, you need some conception of the various gradations of goodness and badness.

Systems thinking is built around the idea that if you take the direct approach to any problem, you’re probably going to screw things up because you don’t see the complexity of the whole system.

Tribalism is the dark twin of community.

As T. S. Eliot observed, the chief illusion of modern political activity is the belief that you can build a system so perfect that the people in it do not have to be good.