The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

In his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche wrote that the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them.

“Don’t let your neighbor drift along in lanes of loneliness,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes. “Don’t permit him to become remote and alienated from you.”

There was a lot of commentary in those days about the soul-sucking perils of conformity, of being nothing more than an organization man, the man in the gray flannel suit, a numb status seeker. There was a sense that the group had crushed the individual, and that people, reduced to a number, had no sense of an authentic self.

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.

Iris Murdoch’s words: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”

Hermann Hesse wrote a short story called “Journey to the East,” in which a group of men take a long journey. They are accompanied by a servant named Leo who does the menial chores and lifts the group’s spirits with his singing. He takes care of the little things. The trip is going well until Leo disappears. Everything falls into disarray, and the t

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.

Listen to your life,” Frederick Buechner wrote.4 “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.”

He writes, he says, for four basic reasons. First, sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever and to get talked about. Second, aesthetic enthusiasm. The pleasure he gets from playing with sentences and words. But Orwell is nothing if not honest. And he has to admit that there are higher motives as well. Third, then, is the “historic impulse,” the desi