The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

May said that love is “ontological

When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness. “Loneliness is the common ground of terror,” she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. True loneliness, Nabeelah Jaffer writes, is not only solitude; it is also a sort of spiritual emptiness, the loss of faith in oneself to come up with answers, “the loss of one’s own self.” It is a feeling of “uprootedness and superfluousness.” Jaffer posits that many militants join the Islamic State because they have no place where they can experience a sense of belonging, and at least IS gives them that. It gives them a way to be a martyr, a hero. People

In The Age of Anxiety, W. H. Auden wrote, We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die. Seasons

In this way it tenderizes the heart.