The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

Work is the way we make ourselves useful to our fellows. “There may be no better way to love your neighbor,” Tim Keller put it, “whether you are writing parking tickets or software or books, than to simply do your work. But only skillful, competent work will do.”

“In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself,” Emerson wrote, “add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, happy enough if he can truly satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.”

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. Springsteen, with no plan B options and no distractions, got to himself quickly.

poem called “Married”: I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment, crying hard, searching for my wife’s hair. For two months got them from the drain, from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator, and off the clothes in the closet. But after other Japanese women came, there was no way to be sure which were hers, and I stopped. A year later, repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

That passage from Corinthians that everybody reads at weddings really does define marital love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

“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?”

Gabriel García Márquez captured it when describing an old couple in Love in the Time of Cholera: In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts …. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.

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. It creates all the situations in which you are more or less compelled to be a less selfish person than you were before.

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

You want to know, If I unveil, will you protect? If I proceed cautiously, will you understand me and match my pace? If I pause, will you respect my pause and wait for me? If I reveal the scariest of my dark monsters, will you hold me? Will you reveal yours? Politeness is at the core of morality.

Another obvious fear is that you’ll discover that the other person seeks a future you cannot provide. The deeper and more potent fear is that in exposing yourself to others you will actually understand yourself.

The crucial question at the depth of any relationship is not Is he crazy? It is What are the ways you are crazy? What parts of your life have been blocked by fear? How exactly do you self-destruct? In what ways have you not been loved?

“Good people will mirror goodness in us, which is why we love them so much,” Richard Rohr writes.

In his great book On Love, Stendhal once described a salt mine near Salzburg, Austria. The miners would stick small, leafless branches down into the salt mines and leave them there for a time. When they would retrieve them, the branches would be covered with a shining layer of diamond-like crystals that shimmered in the light. Stendhal said that enchanted lovers crystallize each other in this way, their adoring eyes scattering diamonds on every virtue of the beloved.

The act of faith was beautifully captured by W. H. Auden: The sense of danger must not disappear: The way is certainly both short and steep, However gradual it looks from here; Look if you like, but you will have to leap. …. A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear: Although I love you, you will have to leap; Our dream of safety has to disappear.

“Courtesy” is a word that has lost its meaning, especially as the daily currency of love, but for the Vanaukens it meant that whatever one person asked of the other, the other would do. “Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water; and the other would peacefully (and sleepily) fetch it.4 We, in fact, defined courtesy as ‘a cup of water in the night.’ And we considered it a very great courtesy to ask for the cup as well as to fetch it.”

“Suffering makes immature love grow into mature love,” Walter Trobisch writes. “Immature unlearned love is egotistic. It’s the kind of love children have, demanding and wanting—and wanting instantaneously.” But the love that comes after forgiveness is marked by empathy, compassion, understanding, and inexplicable care. As Thornton Wilder once put it, “In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

Every year on our anniversary we said, ‘If we are not more deeply in love next year, we shall have failed.’ But we were: a deeper inloveness, more close, more dear.”

“What is fascinating and almost existentially mischievous about marriage,” David Whyte writes, “is that whatever one side of the partnership wants will not occur; whatever the other side of the partnership desires will not occur, and the whatever that does occur is the combined life that emerges from first, the collision, and then the conversation between the two: a conversation that may seem foreign to both to begin with; something they might not recognize or even think they want.”

“Throughout my life,” she wrote, after his death, “it has always seemed a kind of mystery to me that my good husband not only loved and respected me as many husbands love and respect their wives, but almost worshipped me, as though I were some special being created just for him. And that was true not only at the beginning of our marriage but through all the remaining years of it, up to his very death.”

Psychologists joke that a marriage is a battleground in which two families send their best warriors to determine which family’s culture will direct the couple’s lives.

In the end, people in an enduring marriage achieve metis. That’s the Greek word for a kind of practical wisdom, an intuitive awareness of how things are, how things go together, and how things will never go together.

“There’s a habit of mind that the masters have, which is this: they are scanning the social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for

The rule of their research is pretty simple: If you’re tired and your partner makes a bid, turn toward in kindness. If you’re distracted, turn toward in kindness. If you’re stressed, turn toward in kindness.

There is an ancient wisdom in the Jewish belief that a marriage without sex is not a marriage. “The ethic of marriage is hedonistic, not monastic,” writes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik; it is dangerous to be too spiritual about it.

As Kristol, citing Trotsky, put it in his book Neoconservatism, “Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young.1 The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment.”

When J. F. Roxburgh, the headmaster of the Stowe School in Vermont, was asked in the 1920s about the purpose of his institution, he said it was to turn out young men who were “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.”

Fifth, they gave us emotional knowledge. To read Whitman as he exults in joy, to be with Antigone as she struggles to bury her brother, to travel with Galileo as he follows his discoveries wherever they may take him, to be with the mathematician Pascal as he feels the direct presence of God, or to travel with Sylvia Plath into the depths of madness is not necessarily to learn a new fact, but it is to have a new experience.

Emotional knowledge, Roger Scruton argues, is knowing what to feel in certain situations—so that you can be properly disgusted by injustice, properly reverent before an act of self-sacrifice, properly sympathetic in friendship, and properly forbearing when wronged.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing—the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

One day in the concentration camp, he met a young woman, ill and dying in the infirmary. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told him. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.”

“Bless you, prison,” the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “Bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

In the course of his imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn looked at the guard who treated him most cruelly. He realized that if fate had made him a prison guard instead of a prisoner, perhaps he would have been cruel, too. He came to realize that the line between good and evil passes not between tribes or nations but straight through every human heart.

The amazing thing about Exodus is that, as the great Torah scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg observes, it was a story that happened in order to be told. God commands Moses to tell the story of the liberation before He actually performs the liberation.

Exodus is not just describing a ragtag group of people wandering around in the desert. It is describing how resilient people are made. It’s an eternal story of spiritual and moral formation that happens again and again and again.

If I had to capture the core of my Jewish experience, it would be this: Eighteen people sitting around a Shabbat dinner table, all of them talking at once, all of them following all eighteen conversations that are simultaneously crossing the table, all of them correcting the eighteen wrong things that other people have just said.

Jesus is the classic scapegoat, the innocent outsider that all the groups could rally around in their bloodlust, and dump their hatreds on. The only thing that is different about the Jesus story—and it is a big difference—is that in this story Jesus came to earth precisely to be the scapegoat.

He came not to be the awesome conquering Messiah that most of us would want, but to be the lamb, to submit, to love his enemies. He came not to be the victim of sin but the solution. His strength was self-sacrificial, and his weapon love so that we might live. That’s a clever plot twist.

But the Jesus story was not about worldly accomplishment. It was nearly about its opposite. Jesus bowed down in order to rise up; he died so others might live. Christians are not saved by works but by faith. In fact, you can’t earn the prize of salvation, because it has already been given to you by grace.

I was and remain an amphibian, living half in water and half on land. I wish I could remember being confused by the two different stories that were rattling around in my head. But the truth is, I don’t really remember that. I was just raised in a dualism.

I resented a practice that can descend into dry and pedantic legalism. But I respected how Judaism has a ritual for every occasion. The idea is that behavior change precedes and causes internal change (a belief well supported by experimental psychology).

But real healing comes from realizing that your own particular pain is a share of humanity’s pain …. Every time you can shift your attention away from the external situation that caused your pain and focus on the pain of humanity in which you participate, your suffering becomes easier to bear.”

Rabbi Heschel says that awe is not an emotion; it is a way of understanding. “Awe is itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves.”

Like there’s a play you’ve been watching all your life, and suddenly you realize that the play you are seeing onstage is not the only play that’s going on. There’s an underplay, with the same characters, but at a different level, with different logic and forces at work, and greater stakes. There’s a worldly story to follow, as people move closer or further from their worldly ambitions. But there’s also a sacred story to follow, as souls move closer or further from their home, which is God.

Thomas Merton once wrote that “trying to solve the problem of God is like trying to see your own eyeballs.” God is what you see and feel with and through.

Then, as now, I try to hire people who have some progression on their résumé that doesn’t make sense by the conventional logic of the meritocracy. I want to see that they believe in something bigger than the conventional definition of success.

The name of my condition was pride. I was proud of who I had become. I had earned a certain identity and conception of myself by working hard and being pretty good at what I did. I found it easier to work all the time than to face the emptiness that was at the heart of my loneliness.

Walker Percy says that good fiction tells us what we know but don’t quite know that we know.

God is, He is not that. Some cosmologists say there are an infinite number of universes, and in one of them there’s a person just like you sitting in a place just like the place you are sitting. That’s a weird idea, but even that idea is not as weird and incomprehensible as God.

“The moment I begin exercising my will, I find that I have put a fox in charge of the chicken coop,” the late theologian Eugene Peterson wrote.1 “My will is my glory; it is also what gives me the most trouble.” If you make yourself, as William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” put it, “master of my fate … captain of my soul,” you are headed for the rocks.