The road to character often involves moments of moral crisis, confrontation, and recovery. The everyday self-deceptions and illusions of self-mastery were shattered.
They had to humble themselves in self- awareness if they had any hope of rising up transformed. Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland. In the valley of humility they learned to quiet the self.
Only by quieting the self could they see the world clearly. Only by quieting the self could they understand other people and accept what they are offering.
When they had quieted themselves, they had opened up space for grace to flood in. They found themselves understood and cared for by others in ways they did not imagine beforehand. They found themselves loved in ways they did not deserve. They turn around and see how much ground they have left behind. They commit themselves to some long obedience and dedicate themselves to some desperate lark that gives life purpose.
The experience has reshaped their inner core and given it great coherence, solidity, and weight. Self-respect is not the same as self- confidence or self-esteem. Self-respect is not based on IQ or any of the mental or physical gifts that help get you into a competitive college. It is not comparative. It is not earned by being better than other people at something.
It emerges in one who is morally dependable. Self- respect is produced by inner triumphs, not external ones. I can overcome that. In every life there are huge crucible moments, altering ordeals, that either make you or break you. But this process can also happen in daily, gradual ways.
Character is built both through drama and through the everyday. What was on display in Command Performance was more than just an aesthetic or a style. The more I looked into that period, the more I realized I was looking into a different moral country. I began to see a different view of human nature, a different attitude about what is important in life, a different formula for how to live a life of character and depth. But we are morally inarticulate.
Without it, there is a certain superficiality to modern culture, especially in the moral sphere. The central fallacy of modern life is the belief that accomplishments of the Adam I realm can produce deep satisfaction. Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction. Adam I aims for happiness, but Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.
In the pages ahead, I will try to offer some real-life examples of how this sort of life was lived. There is no seven-point program. But we can immerse ourselves in the lives of outstanding people and try to understand the wisdom of the way they lived. One of the nice homes was owned by Mrs. Gordon Norrie, a society matron descended from two of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence.
On March 25, Mrs. Norrie was just sitting down to tea with a group of friends when they heard a commotion outside. Perkins spoke in the upper-crust tones befitting her upbringing—like Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies or Mrs. The ladies ran out. Perkins lifted up her skirts and sprinted toward it.
They had stumbled upon the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, one of the most famous fires in American history. She joined the throng of horrified onlookers on the sidewalk below.
Some saw what they thought were bundles of fabric falling from the windows. They thought the factory owners were saving their best material. They were people, hurling themselves to their death.
It was a horrifying spectacle. One woman grandly emptied her purse over the onlookers below and then hurled herself off. Help is coming. The flames were roasting them from behind.
Forty-seven people ended up jumping. One young man tenderly helped a young woman onto the windowsill. Then he held her out, away from the building, like a ballet dancer, and let her drop. He did the same for a second and a third. Finally, a fourth girl stood on the windowsill; she embraced him and they shared a long kiss.
Then he himself was in the air. As he fell, people noticed, as his pants ballooned out, that he wore smart tan shoes. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best. The pile quickly burst into flames. Somebody alerted the factory manager, Samuel Bernstein, who grabbed some nearby buckets of water and dumped them on the fire. They did little good. They opened the valve, but there was no pressure. As a historian of the fire, David Von Drehle, has argued, Bernstein made a fatal decision in those first three minutes.
He could have spent the time fighting the fire or evacuating the nearly five hundred workers. Instead, he battled the exploding fire, to no effect. Many of the women on the eighth floor were taking the time to go to the dressing room to retrieve their coats and belongings. Eventually, the two factory owners up on the tenth floor were alerted to the fire, which had already consumed the eighth floor and was spreading quickly to their own.
One of them, Isaac Harris, gathered a group of workers and figured it was probably suicidal to try to climb down through the fire. Get on the roof! The other owner, Max Blanck, was paralyzed by fear. Most of the workers on the eighth floor were able to get out, but the workers on the ninth floor had little warning until the fire was already upon them.
They ran like terrified schools of fish from one potential exit to another. There were two elevators, but they were slow and overloaded. There was no sprinkler system. There was a fire escape, but it was rickety and blocked. The factory had been designed to force them through a single choke point in order to get out. Some of the doors were locked. As the fire surrounded them, the workers were left to make desperate life-and-death decisions with limited information in a rising atmosphere of fire, smoke, and terror.
Nelson decided to sprint for one of the stairwells. Weiner went to the elevators and saw an elevator car descending the shaft. She hurled herself into space, diving onto the roof. I gave and received. At a moment like that, there is big confusion and you must understand that you cannot see anything…. A crowd of women were pushing between him and the elevators. He shoved them aside and barreled his way onto the elevator and to safety.
The fire department arrived quickly but its ladders could not reach the eighth floor. The water from its hoses could barely reach that high, just enough to give the building exterior a light dousing. Shame The horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire traumatized the city. People were not only furious at the factory owners, but felt some deep responsibility themselves. The picketers were harassed by company guards. The city looked on indifferently, as it did upon the lives of the poor generally.
We were sorry. Mea culpa! We have tried you, good people of the public—and we have found you wanting! We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high- powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch fire….
We are trying you now and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift.
But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us…. Too much blood has been spilled! Up until that point she had lobbied for worker rights and on behalf of the poor, but she had been on a conventional trajectory, toward a conventional marriage, perhaps, and a life of genteel good works.
Moral indignation set her on a different course. Her own desires and her own ego became less central and the cause itself became more central to the structure of her life. The niceties of her class fell away. She became impatient with the way genteel progressives went about serving the poor.
Perkins hardened. She threw herself into the rough and tumble of politics. She was willing to take morally hazardous action if it would prevent another catastrophe like the one that befell the women at the Triangle factory.
She was willing to compromise and work with corrupt officials if it would produce results. Summoned Today, commencement speakers tell graduates to follow their passion, to trust their feelings, to reflect and find their purpose in life.
When you are young and just setting out into adulthood, you should, by this way of thinking, sit down and take some time to discover yourself, to define what is really important to you, what your priorities are, what arouses your deepest passions. What do I want from life? What are the things that I truly value, that are not done just to please or impress the people around me? By this way of thinking, life can be organized like a business plan. First you take an inventory of your gifts and passions.
Then you map out a strategy to achieve your purpose, which will help you distinguish those things that move you toward your goals from those things that seem urgent but are really just distractions. If you define a realistic purpose early on and execute your strategy flexibly, you will wind up leading a purposeful life. This is a life determined by a series of individual choices. But Frances Perkins found her purpose in life using a different method, one that was more common in past eras.
You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. This perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded.
Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? His wife, mother, and brother died in the camps. Frankl spent most of his time in camp laying tracks for railway lines.
This was not the life he had planned for himself. This was not his passion, or his dream. This is not what he would be doing if he were marching to the beat of his own drummer. But this was the life events had assigned to him. It had given him an assignment. His moral task was to suffer well, to be worthy of his sufferings. The Nazis tried to dehumanize and insult their victims, and some prisoners went along with this degradation or retreated into their memories of a happier past.
But some prisoners struggled against the insults and fortified their own integrity. One could struggle against the insults by asserting small acts of dignity, not necessarily to change your outer life or even your ultimate fate, but to strengthen the beams and pillars of your inner structure. He had the chance to share his observations with his fellow prisoners, and, if he survived, he figured he could spend the rest of his life sharing this knowledge with the world beyond.
When he had the mental energy, he spoke with groups of prisoners, telling them to take their lives seriously and struggle to preserve their inner hold. In the darkness after lights out, he told his fellow prisoners that someone was watching them—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or God—who did not want to be disappointed. These circumstances give us the great chance to justify our gifts. Your ability to discern your vocation depends on the condition of your eyes and ears, whether they are sensitive enough to understand the assignment your context is giving you.
A vocation is not a career. A person choosing a career is looking for something that will provide financial and psychological benefits.
A person does not choose a vocation. A vocation is a calling. Their life would be unrecognizable unless they pursued this line of activity. Sometimes they are called by indignation.
Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle fire and was indignant that this tear in the moral fabric of the world could be permitted to last. Other people are called by an act. Playing is not something she does; a guitarist is who she is. Still other people are called by a Bible verse or a literary passage. A person with a vocation is not devoted to civil rights, or curing a disease, or writing a great novel, or running a humane company because it meets some cost-benefit analysis.
Only force that in the face of obstacles becomes stronger can win. A vocation is not about fulfilling your desires or wants, the way modern economists expect us to do.
She molds herself to the task at hand. Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike! Let me not fall from Thy hand! In the first place, there is the joy they typically take in their own activities.
Dorothy L. People who seek to serve the community end up falsifying their work, she wrote, whether the work is writing a novel or baking bread, because they are not single-mindedly focused on the task at hand. And one sees this in people with a vocation—a certain rapt expression, a hungry desire to perform a dance or run an organization to its utmost perfection. They experience a wonderful certainty of action that banishes weariness from even the hardest days.
This horror had been put in front of her. One ancestor, James Otis, was an incendiary Revolutionary War hero. Howard visited the Perkins home when Frances was fifteen. They gave their daughter a traditional Yankee upbringing: parsimonious, earnest, and brutally honest.
In the evenings, Fred Perkins read Greek poetry and recited Greek plays with friends. He began to teach Frances Greek grammar when she was seven or eight. When Frances was ten, her mother took her to a hat shop. The fashionable hats of the day were narrow and tall, with feathers and ribbons.
What she said next reflects a very different sort of child rearing than is common today. While today we tend to tell children how wonderful they are, in those days parents were more likely to confront children with their own limitations and weaknesses. You have a very broad face. Your head is narrower above the temples than it is at the cheekbones. Also, it lops off very suddenly into your chin.
Never let yourself get a hat that is narrower than your cheekbones, because it makes you look ridiculous. Sometimes that toughness devolved into frigidity. But sometimes it was motivated by and intermixed with a fierce love and tenderness. They worked hard. They did not complain. One evening, Perkins, then a young woman, came downstairs wearing a new party dress. Her father told her that it made her look ladylike. That would have been a sin. Traditional and stern in their private lives, they believed in communal compassion and government action.
They also put tremendous faith in education. For the past years, New England schools have been among the best in the United States. She had a natural facility with words, and in high school she used her glibness to slide by. She then went off to Mount Holyoke College, a member of the class of Today, students live more or less unsupervised in their dorms. They are given the freedom to conduct their private lives as they see fit.
Then, they were placed under restrictions, many of which seem absurd now, that were designed to inculcate deference, modesty, and respect. Freshmen meeting a sophomore on the campus should bow respectfully.
No Freshman shall wear a long skirt or hair high on head before the mid- year examinations. Van Dieman used Latin grammar the way a drill instructor might use forced marches, as an ordeal to cultivate industriousness. She forced Perkins to work, hour upon hour, on precise recitations of the Latin verb tenses.
Nonetheless, her chemistry teacher, Nellie Goldthwaite, hounded her into majoring in chemistry. Goldthwaite urged Perkins to take the hardest courses even if it meant earning mediocre grades. Perkins took the challenge. Goldthwaite became her faculty adviser. It did not see its role, as modern universities tend to, in purely Adam I cognitive terms. It was not there merely to help students question their assumptions.
Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. David Brooks is the author of this powerful book. David provides a lot of food for thought. Case studies of flawed people, all of whom are interesting, and good insight into how their focus on their personal character affected their future success. Those who read David in the New York Times are familiar with his recent bent toward philosophical discourse.
He uses the vehicle of how some famous people struggled with challenges and overcame obstacles both in their environments and within themselves. An enlightening book into the traits of character and how character defined great people and how they gained that character. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download.
Great book, The Second Mountain pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Hillbilly Elegy J. Evicted Matthew Desmond. Popular eBooks. Fear No Evil James Patterson. Mercy David Baldacci. The Awakening Nora Roberts.
From This Moment Melody Grace. The Dark Hours Michael Connelly. The Judge's List John Grisham. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want.
They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.
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