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| Ruan Lingyu in Xin Nüxing (New Woman), Shanghai 1935, via Silents Please. |
Tolstoyan deep thinker David F. Brooks ("Ordinary People Are Leading the Leaders") is learning, and hoping others will learn, from the masses, and the beauteous simplicity of their way of life, doing without frivolous luxuries like long-term thinking:
Endurance is patience. It is shortening your time horizon so you just have to get through this day. Endurance is living with unpleasantness. In fact, it is finding you can adapt and turn the strangest circumstance into routine.
Endurance is fortifying. It is discovering you can get socked in the nose and take it.
Above all, endurance is living with uncertainty. Sometimes, it’s remaining quiet in the face of uncertainty because no conjecture will really tell you what is coming. Endurance is the knowledge that the only way out is through and whatever must be borne will be borne.
