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【橘猫推书】
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
by David Brooks
FIVE: The Wilderness
The normal reaction to a season of suffering is to try to get out of it. Address the symptoms. Have a few drinks. Play a few sad records. Move on.
The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.
The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge. There are no shortcuts. There's just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new. From the agony of the valley, to the purgation in the desert, to the insight on the mountaintop.
So how do you start this three-part journey? Fortunately, people have been thinking about this for thousands of years, and they've given us models on how to do it.
Moses, for example, had an inchoate idea of what his life was about. He was growing up in the pharaoh's palace (very nice!), but he had a moral conscience. He hated the oppression of the Jews, and he killed an Egyptian guard who mistreated a slave. But his mini-rebellion backfired because it was random and self-indulgent. He had to flee Egypt a failure, even in the eyes of his fellow Jews. Moses went off to be alone. He took his flock of sheep “far away into the desert.”
While he was out there, according to the rabbinic tradition, a little lamb ran away from the flock, and Moses pursued it. Normally, it's easy to catch a stray lamb. They're not the fastest creatures on earth, and they generally don't wander far. But this time something strange happened. The lamb ran like a gazelle. Moses sprinted farther into the wilderness but could not keep pace. The lamb ran out ahead, farther away. Finally, the lamb stopped at a spring to drink, and Moses caught her.
The lamb, of course, is Moses himself. Moses was hidden and unknown even to himself. As the Sufi saying puts it, “I was a hidden treasure.” He had to go far off into the wilderness, and then even farther into that empty place in pursuit of a stray lamb, to finally come to himself.
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.
A lot is gained simply by going into a different physical place. You need to taste and touch and feel your way toward a new way of being. And there are huge benefits in leaving the center of things and going off into the margins. “You are living through an unusual time,” Henri Nouwen writes.
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.
In the wilderness, life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention. Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasing habits that have become interwoven into your personality. “What happens when a ‘gifted child' finds himself in a wilderness where he's stripped of any way of proving his worth?” asks Belden Lane in Backpacking with the Saints. “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.”
Solitude in the wilderness changes your experience of time. Normal life happens in ordinary time—the commute to work / do the dishes sense of time. But the wilderness marks time in eons; nothing changes quickly. The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment. When you have been away in the wilderness for weeks, you begin to move at kairos time. The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.
The leanness of wilderness life prepares you for intimacy with yourself. Sometimes that surfaces the pain. There are the red-hot memories of past failures and past grief. There are all the wounds inflicted by parents and grandparents. There are your own bad actions that flow from these wounds—your tendency to lash out, or your tendency to be hyper-afraid of abandonment, or your tendency to be incommunicative and to withdraw at the first sign of stress.
“Your pain is deep and it won't just go away,” Nouwen continues. “It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences. Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others.” As the saying goes, suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.
LISTENING TO YOUR LIFE
When people are out there in the wilderness, they learn to receive and review their life. “If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life,” Frederick Buechner wrote. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
The teacher Parker Palmer echoes the theme: “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.”
The core of that, for Palmer, was listening. “Trying to live someone else's life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and even do great damage.” You don't find your vocation through an act of taking charge. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”
I have a friend named Pete Wehner who is an amazing listener. I'll describe some problem to him, and he'll ask me some questions. There comes a moment in the conversation, after he's asked four or five questions, when I expect him to start offering his opinions and recommendations. But then he surprises me and asks six or eight more questions, before eventually offering counsel or advice. Real listening, whether to others or yourself, involves that unexpected extra round of questions, stretching the asking beyond what feels natural.
Listening to your life means having patience. Many of us confront most of life with a prematurely evaluating attitude. We have a natural tendency to make up our mind instantly, the moment we encounter something. The problem is that once we've filed something away with a judgment—even our very selves—we stop seeing it in all its complexity. The wilderness teaches negative capability, the ability to rest in uncertainty, to not jump to premature conclusions.
Listening to life means asking, What have I done well? What have I done poorly? What do I do when I'm not being paid or rewarded? Were there times when I put on faces that other people wanted me to wear, or that I thought other people wanted me to wear?
When you're in the wilderness, a better version of yourself has a tendency to emerge. “When I venture into wilderness, I'm surprised by how much I enjoy my own company,” Belden Lane writes. “The person I travel with there isn't worried about his performance. He sheds the polished persona he tries so often to project to others. Scribbling in my journal under the shade of a pin oak atop Bell Mountain, I'm happy as a lark. I want to be the person that I am when I'm alone in wilderness.” This is the beginning of an important revelation.
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us,” Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk. “But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other.”
This is the pivotal point, maybe of this whole book. On the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside.
After her first daughter was born, a friend of mine, Catherine Bly Cox, told me, “I found I loved her more than evolution required.” I've always loved that observation because it points to that deeper layer. There are the things that drive us toward material pleasure, and there are evolutionary forces that drive us to reproduce and pass down our genes. These are the layers of life covered by economics and political science and evolutionary psychology. But those layers don't explain Chartres Cathedral or “Ode to Joy”; they don't explain Nelson Mandela in jail, Abraham Lincoln in the war room, or a mother holding her baby. They don't explain the fierceness and fullness of love, as we all experience it.
This is the layer we're trying to reach in the wilderness. These are the springs that will propel us to our second mountain.
When you have touched these deeper sources, you have begun to make the ego your servant and not your master. Over the years, your ego has found a specific way it wants you to be in order to win the most approval—what Henri Nouwen calls the “ego ideal.” The ego wants you to point your life to the role that will make you seem smart, good-looking, and admirable. It's likely you have spent a lot of time so far conforming to the ego ideal.
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 deep level that you sense a different life, one your ego cannot even fathom. There's something in you that senses, as C. S. Lewis wrote, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
We're at the first stage of renunciation—shedding the old self so the new self can emerge. 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.
SIX: Heart and Soul
Not long ago I read a passage in a book about a guy who bought a house with a bamboo stand growing near his driveway. He decided to get rid of it, so he cut it down, then took an ax to its roots and smashed them into little pieces. He dug down and removed as much of the root system as he could and then he poured a plant poison over what remained. He filled the hole with several feet of gravel, and then, taking no chances, paved it over with cement. Two years later he noticed something: A little green bamboo shoot pushing up through the cement. That bamboo was unquenchable. It could not stop pushing upward.
We have something like that inside ourselves. It is our desire. We are often taught by our culture that we are primarily thinking beings—Homo sapiens. Sometimes our schools and companies treat us as nothing but analytic brains. But when we're in the valley, we get a truer and deeper view of who we really are and what we really need. When we're in the valley our view of what's important in life is transformed. We begin to realize that the reasoning brain is actually the third most important part of our consciousness. The first and most important part is the desiring heart.
As the Augustinian scholar James K. A. Smith writes, “To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” There is some deep part of ourselves from where desires flow. We're defined by what we desire, not what we know.
Look at kids in a school play—singing with all their might, dancing as best they can, concentrating furiously to get it right. There is something in them that animates them, the dream of being a star, the drive of pleasing a teacher or making a difference in the world or simply being great. The world may do a good job of paving over their desires, but those green bamboo shoots push stubbornly upward. Cruel adults and broken relationships will do their best to break the green shoots, boring schools try to dull them, poverty tries to starve them, but if you look at kids in even the roughest circumstances, nine times out of ten the green shoot is still there, desiring, dreaming, pushing upward.
Our emotions guide us. Our emotions assign value to things and tell us what is worth wanting. The passions are not the opposite of reason; they are the foundation of reason and often contain a wisdom the analytic brain can't reach. The ultimate heart's desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone. Think about it: Almost every movie you've ever seen is about somebody experiencing this intense sense of merging with something, giving themselves away to something—a mission, a cause, a family, a nation, or a beloved. In the movie Casablanca, for example, the hero, Rick, has had his heart covered over. But love reawakens it. By the end he is a whole person again, committed, full of mission and desire.
The ultimate desire is the desire for fusion with a beloved other, for an I–Thou bond, the wholehearted surrender of the whole being, the pure union, the intimacy beyond fear. In his novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières described this last best stop on the journey of heart. An old guy is talking to his daughter about his love for his late wife. He tells her, “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.”
This is the heart fulfilled.
THE SOUL
The other more important part of the consciousness is the soul. Now, I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God. I'm a writer, not a missionary. That is not my department. But I do ask you to believe that you have a soul. There is some piece of your consciousness that has no shape, size, weight, or color. This is the piece of you that is of infinite value and dignity. The dignity of this piece doesn't increase or decrease with age; it doesn't get bigger or smaller depending on your size and strength. Rich and successful people don't have more or less of it than poorer or less successful people.
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.
Because each person has a soul, each person is owed a degree of respect and goodwill from others. Because each person has a soul, we are rightly indignant when that dignity is insulted, ignored, or obliterated. Slavery is wrong because it insults the fundamental dignity of a human soul. Rape is not just an assault on a collection of physical molecules; it is an insult to a human soul. It is an obscenity. Obscenity, the philosopher Roger Scruton teaches, is anything that covers up another person's soul.
The soul is the seedbed of your moral consciousness and your ethical sense. As C. S. Lewis observed, there's never been a country where people are admired for running away in battle, or for double-crossing people who were kind to them. We seem to be oriented by these moral sentiments the way other animals are oriented by the magnetic field. They are embedded in our natures. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within,” Immanuel Kant wrote.
Mostly, what the soul does is yearn. If the heart yearns for fusion with another person or a cause, the soul yearns for righteousness, for fusion with the good. Socrates said that the purpose of life is the perfection of our souls—to realize the goodness that the soul longs for. Everyone I've ever met wants to lead a good and meaningful life. People feel bereft when they don't experience purpose and meaning in their lives. Even criminals and sociopaths come up with rationalizations to explain why the bad things they did were actually good or at least excusable because nobody can live with the idea that they are thoroughly bad.
Because we all have souls, we are all involved in a moral drama, of which we might have lower or higher awareness in any given moment. When we do something good we feel elevation, and when we do something bad we start making moral justifications. John Steinbeck put it beautifully in East of Eden:
Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last….A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
If you look at world history or current events, you see how often events are driven by our need to feel morally justified, our need to feel righteous and to offer care, and unfortunately our need to assign guilt and feel morally superior. The moral drive explains so much that is good in the world and, when it is twisted by the desire to feel superior, so much that is evil.
The odd thing about the soul is that while it is powerful and resilient, it is also reclusive. You can go years without really feeling the force of its yearning. You are enjoying the pleasures of life, building your career. It's amazing how untroubled you can be, year after year, while your soul is out there somewhere far away.
But eventually it hunts you down. In this way the soul is like a reclusive leopard living high up in the mountain forest somewhere. You may forget about him for long stretches. You are busy with the normal mundane activities of life, and the leopard is up in the mountains. But from time to time out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse the leopard, just off in the distance, trailing you through the tree trunks.
There are spare moments when you vaguely or even urgently feel his presence. This can happen agonizingly, in the middle of one of those sleepless nights, when your thoughts come, as one poet puts it, like a drawer full of knives. There's trouble in your soul, and it keeps you awake.
The leopard can visit during one of those fantastic moments with friends or family—when you look out at the laughing faces of your own children across a picnic table on some perfect summer day, and you are overwhelmed by gratitude. In those moments, you feel called to be worthy of such undeserved happiness, and the soul sort of swells with joy.
And then there are moments, maybe more toward middle or old age, when the leopard comes down out of the hills and just sits there in the middle of your doorframe. He stares at you, inescapably. He demands your justification. What good have you served? For what did you come? What sort of person have you become? There are no excuses at that moment. Everybody has to throw off the mask.
A FORTUNATE FALL
In the valley, if you are fortunate, you learn to see yourself as a whole person. You learn you are not just a brain and a set of talents to impress the world, but a heart and soul—primarily heart and soul. Now everything you do for the rest of your life is likely to be testimony to that reality.
When you ask people what experience made them the person they are, they never say, “I really was a shallow and selfish jerk until I went on that amazing vacation in Hawaii.” No, people usually talk about moments of difficulty, struggle. The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it bluntly, maybe a little too bluntly: “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.”
The reason transformation happens in the valley is because something that had hitherto been useful and pleasant needs to die. That thing is the ego self, the impressive rational way of being we constructed for ourselves on the first mountain. People develop this ego self so they can perform the tasks of the first mountain: to bull your way into the world, get a job, make your mark, build an identity. But there is a deeper self underneath that can't be seen unless the ego self falls away.
For Nathaniel Hawthorne it took a serious illness and a confrontation with death to blast him out of his ego ideal. “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.”
After the old self is relinquished, the heart and soul have space to take control. Old desires are shed and bigger desires are formed. The movement, clinical psychologist Daphne de Marneffe writes, is “deepening inward and expanding outward.” When you go down inside yourself, you find that there are longings in there that are only completed when you are loving and serving others. “And then,” says the poet Rilke, “the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.”
When this relinquishment of the ego self and emergence of the heart and soul has happened, people are ready to begin the second mountain. Except they don't describe it as another climb. They describe it, often enough, as a fall. They have let go of something, and they are falling through themselves. Most of us need an earthquake to push us into that fortunate fall. Our job now is to be defeated by ever grander things. It is to trust in life and surrender to the callings that will catch us and show us the way.
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.”
In 1849, a young Fyodor Dostoyevsky experienced his valley and the beginning of his recovery in a single moment. He had been imprisoned in Saint Petersburg with a group of other revolutionaries and sentenced to die. The men were marched out into a square in their burial shrouds. The firing squad gathered, and the drums sounded. Death was seconds away. Then, at that instant, by prearranged plan, a messenger arrived on horseback. The execution was to be stayed by the clemency of the czar. The original sentences would apply—hard labor.
One man broke down crying, singing out “Long live the czar!” Another went mad. Dostoyevsky was brought back to his cell and suddenly was overcome with joy. “I cannot recall when I was ever as happy as on that day,” he later recalled. “I walked up and down my cell…and sang the whole time, sang at the top of my voice, so happy at being given back my life!”
He immediately wrote a letter to his brother: “And only then did I know how much I loved you my dear brother!” All the small questions that used to concern him fell away. “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.”
His life, he felt, would begin again. “Never has there seethed in me such an abundant and healthy kind of spiritual life as now….Now my life will change, I shall be born again in new form….Life is a gift. Life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness….Life is everywhere, life is in ourselves, not in the exterior.”
Most of us don't get marched in front of a firing squad and then pardoned. Most of us learn the lesson Dostoyevsky learned gradually, over seasons of suffering, often in the wilderness. 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.
Maybe some of us will learn these lessons while racking up success after success, or just being thoroughly loved, but for most of us the process is different: We have a season when we chase the shallow things in life. We are not fulfilled. Then comes hardship, which exposes the heart and soul. The heart and soul teach us that we cannot give ourselves what we desire most. Fulfillment and joy are on the far side of service. Only then are we really able to love. Only then are we able to begin the second journey.