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nogglization 's review for:
The Road to Character
by David Brooks
As a big fan of Ryan Holiday, I jumped into the book a little prematurely after seeing it on this list: If You Only Read A Few Books In 2018, Read These. Even if I had read more reviews before starting, I'm not sure I would have been prepared for the drudgery and sermonizing that awaited.
One might say reading this book is a "character building experience"—as it is long, dry, and painful. In all fairness, the opening and closing of the book were not bad. It's the middle of the book, made up of eight chapters of exhaustive and rambling biographies that was most difficult to get through.
Although the Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Eliot, Augustine, and Michel de Montaigne portions were fairly interesting, they still tended to involve rather inane elements that seemed unnecessary. Many of the "brief" biographical sketches were so long winded, they simply felt like they were taking up space. Brooks discusses the personal weaknesses of 14 individuals from history, how they dealt with moral issues, and the guidelines they strove (or failed) to live by.
Attempting to illustrate his points through the lens of past lives seems like a cop out to me. At least half as many people could have been scrutinized. Why not just state your points, Brooks? Why beat these personal narratives to death and muddle the message?
Speaking of beatings, reading this book felt akin to some form of self-flagellation. Each mini biography, 100 lashes with a barbed morality meter. Save yourself misery and read the intro and the conclusion, which wraps things up with 15 numbered points for a condensed summary.
The Guardian called this book "a smug search for the roots of good nature" that gets hopelessly lost along the way and I have to agree. It meanders around and through religious elements, questions of character, and morality in a way that can feel preachy and judgmental.
Suffering is much discussed, but for me, it was my own that inspired the 2 star rating.
Here's a taste of Dorothy Day's section:
"Day was unusual, maybe even perverse, in that she sometimes seemed to seek out suffering as a road to depth. She probably observed, as we all do, that people we call deep have almost always endured a season of suffering, or several such seasons. But she seemed to seek out those seasons, and to avoid some of the normal pleasures of life that would have brought simple earthly happiness. She often sought out occasions for moral heroism, occasions to serve others in acts of enduring hardship.
For most of us, there is nothing intrinsically noble about suffering. Just as failure is sometimes just failure (and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs), suffering is sometimes just destructive, to be exited or medicated as quickly as possible. When it is not connected to some larger purpose beyond itself, suffering strings or annihilates people. When it is not understood as a piece of a larger process, it leads to doubt, nihilism, and despair.
But some people can connect their suffering to some greater design. They place their suffering in solidarity with all the others who have suffered. These people are clearly ennobled by it. It is not the suffering itself that makes all the difference, but the way it is experienced ...
The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into yourself. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be. The pain involved in, say, composing a great piece of music of the grief of having lost a loved one smashes through a floor they thought was the bottom floor of their soul, revealing a cavity below, and then it smashes through that floor, revealing another cavity, and so on and so on. The person in pain descends to unknown ground.
Suffering opens up ancient places of pain that had been hidden. It exposes frightening experiences that had been repressed, shameful wrongs that had been committed. It spurs some people to painfully and carefully examine the basement of their own soul. But it also presents the pleasurable sensation that one is getting closer to the truth. The pleasure in suffering is that you feel you are getting beneath the superficial and approaching the fundamental. It creates what modern psychologists call "depressive realism," and ability to see things exactly the way they are. It shatters the comforting rationalizations and pat narratives we tell ourselves as part of our way of simplifying ourselves for the world."
And so on and so on.
You get the drift. Honestly, this book was mostly about suffering and it did make me consider and question the depths of my own suffering in a new, and esoteric way.
_____
Quotes like this one:
"In the process of subordinating ourselves to the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are. The customs of the institution structure the soul, making it easier to be good. They guide behavior gently along certain time-tested lines. By practicing the customs of an institution, we are not alone; we are admitted into a community that transcends time."
... stoke my inner rebel and strike me as conservative non-progressive dogma.
Interested in hearing other's take on this book.
One might say reading this book is a "character building experience"—as it is long, dry, and painful. In all fairness, the opening and closing of the book were not bad. It's the middle of the book, made up of eight chapters of exhaustive and rambling biographies that was most difficult to get through.
Although the Dwight D. Eisenhower, George Eliot, Augustine, and Michel de Montaigne portions were fairly interesting, they still tended to involve rather inane elements that seemed unnecessary. Many of the "brief" biographical sketches were so long winded, they simply felt like they were taking up space. Brooks discusses the personal weaknesses of 14 individuals from history, how they dealt with moral issues, and the guidelines they strove (or failed) to live by.
Attempting to illustrate his points through the lens of past lives seems like a cop out to me. At least half as many people could have been scrutinized. Why not just state your points, Brooks? Why beat these personal narratives to death and muddle the message?
Speaking of beatings, reading this book felt akin to some form of self-flagellation. Each mini biography, 100 lashes with a barbed morality meter. Save yourself misery and read the intro and the conclusion, which wraps things up with 15 numbered points for a condensed summary.
The Guardian called this book "a smug search for the roots of good nature" that gets hopelessly lost along the way and I have to agree. It meanders around and through religious elements, questions of character, and morality in a way that can feel preachy and judgmental.
Suffering is much discussed, but for me, it was my own that inspired the 2 star rating.
Here's a taste of Dorothy Day's section:
"Day was unusual, maybe even perverse, in that she sometimes seemed to seek out suffering as a road to depth. She probably observed, as we all do, that people we call deep have almost always endured a season of suffering, or several such seasons. But she seemed to seek out those seasons, and to avoid some of the normal pleasures of life that would have brought simple earthly happiness. She often sought out occasions for moral heroism, occasions to serve others in acts of enduring hardship.
For most of us, there is nothing intrinsically noble about suffering. Just as failure is sometimes just failure (and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs), suffering is sometimes just destructive, to be exited or medicated as quickly as possible. When it is not connected to some larger purpose beyond itself, suffering strings or annihilates people. When it is not understood as a piece of a larger process, it leads to doubt, nihilism, and despair.
But some people can connect their suffering to some greater design. They place their suffering in solidarity with all the others who have suffered. These people are clearly ennobled by it. It is not the suffering itself that makes all the difference, but the way it is experienced ...
The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into yourself. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be. The pain involved in, say, composing a great piece of music of the grief of having lost a loved one smashes through a floor they thought was the bottom floor of their soul, revealing a cavity below, and then it smashes through that floor, revealing another cavity, and so on and so on. The person in pain descends to unknown ground.
Suffering opens up ancient places of pain that had been hidden. It exposes frightening experiences that had been repressed, shameful wrongs that had been committed. It spurs some people to painfully and carefully examine the basement of their own soul. But it also presents the pleasurable sensation that one is getting closer to the truth. The pleasure in suffering is that you feel you are getting beneath the superficial and approaching the fundamental. It creates what modern psychologists call "depressive realism," and ability to see things exactly the way they are. It shatters the comforting rationalizations and pat narratives we tell ourselves as part of our way of simplifying ourselves for the world."
And so on and so on.
You get the drift. Honestly, this book was mostly about suffering and it did make me consider and question the depths of my own suffering in a new, and esoteric way.
_____
Quotes like this one:
"In the process of subordinating ourselves to the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are. The customs of the institution structure the soul, making it easier to be good. They guide behavior gently along certain time-tested lines. By practicing the customs of an institution, we are not alone; we are admitted into a community that transcends time."
... stoke my inner rebel and strike me as conservative non-progressive dogma.
Interested in hearing other's take on this book.