David Brooks at Chicago, 2017¶
01 see the world clearly¶
It was exciting to know that the ideas of some dead genius, could transport me and give me a glimmer of a higher realm.
The mysteries of life and how to live well were there for the seizing for those who read well and thought deeply.
These intellectual virtues may seem elitist, but once a country tolerates dishonesty, incuriosity and intellectual laziness, then everything else falls apart.
John Ruskin once wrote, “The more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me— that the greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something, and tell what is saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”
“我越是深入地思考，我就越倾向于得出这个结论——人类所能做的最了不起之事就是，看到了什么，便如实地说出来。千百人口说不如一人思索，千万人思索不如一人见过。”
I met so many professors and students who could weigh evidence and who didn’t tolerate intellectual shabbiness. It aroused in me a desire to have that virtue—the ability to see clearly and face unpleasant facts.
02 be wise¶
Then there was the second yearning which is the yearning to be wise.
There is a deep humanity, gentleness, and stability to a wise person. That person can perceive, with love and generosity, the foibles of another heart. That person can grasp the nub of any situation, see around corners and has developed an intuitive awareness of what will go together and what will never go together.
根植于心的人性、风度和稳重就体现在智者的身上。他能透过爱与包容去审视别人的缺陷；他能直指任何问题的核心；环顾四野，便可洞见凝聚之力与不可强求之事。
That wisdom, I imagine, comes from paying deep and loving attention to the people around you. It comes from many hours of solitary reflection. It comes from reading of the greats. It comes from getting out of your own century, thinking outside of your assumptions and embarking on a great lifelong journey toward understanding.
在我看来，要具备这种智慧，我们需真情实意地关怀身边的人，需要时常在独处中自我反省，需要阅读伟大的作品；需要我们跳出所置身的时代，跳出自己现有的成见，动身踏上求取理解的终身之旅。
03 pursue ideals¶
Third, Chicago gave me a yearning for ideals. It is sometimes said that we humans seek happiness. We seek the fulfillment of our desires. But of course that’s not true. Peace and happiness is great for a while but after a bit it gets boring. “What our human emotions seem to require,” William James once wrote, “is the sight of struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to the uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous journey—this is the sort of thing that inspires us.”
Some man or womans’ pains in pursuit of some exalted ideal.
These yearnings that I have described transplanted me here--to see the world clearly, to be wise, to pursue ideals—these weren’t really the yearnings of the mind. They were yearnings from deeper, from the part of us that can only be called the soul.
The poet Rilke had an education like ours. He wrote, “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish. I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now. What happens there I do not know.”
诗人里尔克曾有过类似的体会。他写道：我学着看见。我不知为何如此，但此刻，一切都向我深处渗透，一切都不再停留在它们之前停下的地方。我体内还有一个我，我不知道的我。一切都到了未知的领地，那里发生的事我并不知晓。
There is still the same honest and unironic hunger for wisdom. There is still the willingness to put your ideas out there and argue and listen. There is still that ardent searching for truth and the willingness to be silly in pursuit of it.
仍然可见的是那种诚肯端正的求知若渴，仍然可见的是人们愿意亮出观点，然后辩论和倾听。仍然可见的是求真的热情，以及不耻下问的精神。
We have a Telos Crisis in this country. Many people do not have a clear sense of their goals and their own purpose. They don’t know what they are shooting for, or what fundamental convictions should guide their behavior. They’ve been trained in hyper-specialized research universities that tell them how to do things but don’t ask them to think about why they should do them; that don’t give them a forum to ask the questions, What is my own best life? What am I called to do? Why am I here?
Our friend Nietzsche said that he who has a why to live for can endure any how. But if you don’t know what your purpose is then the first failure or setback can totally throw you into crisis and total collapse.
我们的朋友尼采曾说过，若知为何而生，遂可纳受一切。
The young person without a conscious purpose graduates and hopes by piling success upon success he can fill the void within. He becomes what the writer Matias Dalsgaard calls: “The Insecure Overachiever”. Such a person, ” Dalsgaard writes, “must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem. It is an impossible situation. You can’t compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top of it. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundations won’t be found out if only the construction work keeps going.”
You’ll have a harder time being shallow. You may not know your life’s purpose or your calling, but you know that that mountain world exists and you can explore it, and that the answers can be found up there in the Museum of Beautiful Things, and that knowledge itself will be a source of great comfort and stability.
Life at the university of Chicago is not always filled with day to day happiness. But it gives you glimpses of cosmic happiness, glimpses of understanding the long story all involved in. And if you have cosmic joy, because you know this story is ultimately about something meaningful, holy and good, you can bear the day to day miseries a lot better.
04 intimacy¶
But in my era, and maybe today, Chicago did not prepare its students for intimacy. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to see that the capacity for intimacy is one of the more crucial talents for a fulfilling life.
That’s because the primary challenges of life are not knowledge challenges, they are motivational challenges. It’s not only knowing what is good, but being completely and passionately devoted and loving what is good.
It’s about passionately loving your spouse and family in a way that brings out their loveliness. It’s about loving your vocation with fierce dedication. It’s about loving your community with a serving heart. It’s about loving your philosophy or your God with a humble fervor.
A fulfilled life is moving from open options to sweet compulsions. It’s about saying no to a thousand things so you can say a few big yeses to the things you are deeply bound to. It’s about loving things so much that you’re willing to chain yourself down to them. The things you chain yourself to are the things that set you free.
And it’s not only loving Platonically. It’s actually and intimately living out the day to day realities of your fierce love. It’s intimately sharing the same bathroom or getting up every day and writing on the same damn laptop.
It’s about mastering all the phases of intimacy: being open to the first enticing glance. Having the energy to really learn about those people, like those people on a first date who learn how much they have in common with each other and treat these things as amazing miracles: “You don’t like foigras? Neither do I! We should get married!”
It’s about having the courage to engage in the reciprocal cycle of ever greater vulnerability. It’s about enduring faithfully when there is some crisis and you’re not sure you believe in this relationship, this career or this institution. It’s about forgiveness for the betrayals committed against you and asking forgiveness when you have let down your friends or your profession or your spouse. When you make an intimate connection—to a spouse, a friend, a profession or a community or faith—you are as Leon Wieseltier puts is, “consenting to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect.” And so one needs the skills of intimacy to live well in such close proximity. One needs the skills of intimacy to achieve the kind of fusion that leads to real joy—when a couple become one loving entity, when you and your vocation have merged into a single identity, when your love for your God or your philosophy is a complete surrender.
What I’m describing here are emotional arts. They are not natural but have to be acquired by repeated vulnerability, commitment and experience.
When I was here at Chicago, we students by and large did not excel at intimacy. We were artful dodgers, with a superb ability to slip out of situations at moments when deep heart to heart connection might come. We were in the business at age 20 or 21 of trying to make a good impression, so of course we weren’t going to show the unattractive sides of ourselves, which is an absolute prerequisite of intimacy.
We were busy with our work and our books and student activities, and we told ourselves, idiotically, that we didn’t have time for deep relationships. We too often approached each other shrouded in what Candace Vogler calls an “edifice of thought.” When confronted with uncertainty or a difficulty, we tended to revert to our strengths, which were our IQs and our thinking and talking skills. We sought to be masters of our life, rather than surrendering to emotions which are so much out of our control.
Too much emphasis was put on scholarship and professionalism, and those things were defined by a pose of detachment, specialization, critical thinking, aloofness and a mythical belief in cool reasoning.
Too much time was spent studying, which is solitary activity. Too much of student life was oriented around the Reg, and not because couples were fooling around in the stacks.
I left Chicago better at reading books than at reading people.
I did not have the eyes to see the beauty in people who were so open hearted that they had nothing particularly interesting to say. I didn’t know how to handle the deepest and scariest intimacies. I’m hoping I’m a little better.
Life will offer you a diminishing number of opportunities to show how smart you are. It will offer an infinite number of occasions that require kindness, mercy, grace, sensitivity, sympathy, generosity and love. Life will require that you widen your repertoire of emotions, that you throw yourself headlong into other people. That you take the curriculum of intimacy. If you haven’t mastered it yet, I ask you to turn to this task intentionally now.