The book he didn't write

Tom Sawyer curates Aunt Polly's board fence. Via.

David "I guess I wrote this book to save my own soul" Brooks appears to be developing into a kind of corporate person, theroadtocharacter.com, and he's awfully busy, so instead of writing a column today he curated one, a little exhibit of pieces from the crowd-sourced part of the website, where ordinary folks write in to share how they have gone about finding meaning or purpose in life.

So it would be kind of mean-spirited to criticize these volunteers, who seem like pretty nice and thoughtful persons (humble enough to admire Brooks a lot more than he deserves and assume his sincerity). Though it wouldn't have hurt to have an editor check the singular-plural issue of the contributor who described "an amazingly consistent phenomena". In fact Brooks has engineered himself the startling feat of using the adverb "amazingly" twice in one brief essay—it's possible, of course, that he hasn't read today's column at all.

They have a message worth attending to, that you don't have to be St. Augustine or Bayard Rustin or Frances Perkins to have a meaningful life: you might just cultivate your garden, like 85-year-old Hans Pitsch, who writes,

I enjoy my family (not all of them) and the shrinking number of old friends. You use the term ‘organizing frame’ in one’s life. I am not sure if I want to be framed by an organizing principle, but if there is one thing that keeps me focused, it’s the garden. Lots of plants died during the harsh winter, but, amazingly [there's the other one, for once putting it to a legitimate linguistic purpose], the clematises and the roses are back, and lettuce, spinach and tomatoes are thriving in the new greenhouse.

See how gently he corrects one of Brooks's stupid assumptions. They all do, in fact:

I was able to relieve myself of the need to do something important, from which I would reap praise and be rewarded with fulfillment...

Perhaps... the mission is not a mission at all.

I used to be one of the solid ones — one of the people whose purpose was clearly defined and understood.... Now my purpose is simply to be the person ... who can pick up the phone and give you 30 minutes in your time of crisis...

In a way, they're writing the book Brooks was promising back when he first went in to humility studies, before he got sidetracked into making it about moral celebrities instead (of course the research for that was a lot easier, since they're all the subjects of multiple biographies from which he could simply cull the bits he liked), and turned it into the story of how good people are really exceptional, and one can't expect to be one oneself.

The book he didn't write, assembling itself at the website, turns out to be about the moral pleasure of the small and unpretentious one-thing-and-another life, about the possibility of being a moderately good person without one of those organizing frames or anal-compulsive rule systems provided by Burkean tradition, about the spiritual satisfaction of simple physical things, about modesty as a fact rather than a Burkean slogan.

It's a book Brooks never could have written, because although he seems to have learned such things exist, he's forever barred from experiencing them by his long practice of false humility and secret arrogance, selfishness, and resentment of those more talented and harder-working than he is. He's like one of those megachurch ministers preaching the gospel of renunciation and uncomplaining service from a pulpit cushioned with sinful luxury. He holds on to a job he hates and is unqualified for, by his teeth, for the incalculable amount of prestige and money he earns not from his poorly done work but just from his position, among the crowd who admire that kind of thing and the innocents genuinely interested in the moral life who took him at face value, bought the book, and sent their commentaries in.

If he really wants to save his soul, he can't do it by writing a best seller and discussing it on TV and at BookCon and in TED talks and allowing the PR folks to turn it into a website. He needs to retire into obscurity, learn something from the inside about that simple life, maybe clean his own room and prepare his own food, give a dollar to a panhandler, go for a walk in the woods, reconnect with family members, even keep a journal or an anonymous blog. As is, he's doing it wrong.

Update: Driftglass thinks Hans Pitsch is funny. OK, well, so he's kind of funny. Actually hysterical, the way Drifty sets it up. Very unfair.