The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  She’d exercise in the pool in the morning and go for a walk, and then in the afternoons she would return to the little workshop she had built. Gene Cohen, founding chief of the Center on Aging at the National Institute of Mental Health has argued that the duration of an activity is more important than the activity itself: “In other words, a book club that meets on a regular basis over a course of months or years contributes a great deal more to a person’s well-being than the same number of one-shot activities, such as movies, lectures or outings.”

  As she continued to carve, Erica found that she was building a repertoire of knowledge and skills. She had to observe the wood she had in front of her—not the generic concept of wood, but the specific piece. She had to divine what household item—napkin holder, a bookstand, or even a piece of a table—lay in its grain.

  At first she moved forward clumsily. But she’d walk through stores and crafts fairs, observing how craftsmen worked. She didn’t like the whole “authenticity” atmosphere of the crafts movement. But she liked the objects themselves and how they fit together. As she observed and worked, she got better. She developed a set of hunches that guided her along, a repertoire of feels and gestures. She was astonished to find that she had her own style. She didn’t know how she got it. She just fiddled around with things until they seemed right.

  Over and over again, Erica tried to do too much. This late in life she still underestimated how long any project was likely to take her. But she found herself enjoyably dissatisfied by her work. She got a glimpse of some ideal thing she would want to create, and then she’d tinker and tinker with it, never quite eliminating the tension between the reality and the perfection she felt inside. But still she chased it. She understood what Marcel Proust might have been feeling when he dictated new passages of a novel from his deathbed. He wanted to change a section in which a character was dying, because now he knew how it really felt.

  The muses came and went. After working for a few hours, she felt her brain running dry, as if little carbonated bubbles in her brain had been used up and everything had gone flat. She became clumsy, lazy and stale. Then other times she would awake in the middle of the night, absolutely sure of what she should do to solve a problem. The mathematician Henri Poincaré solved one of the most difficult problems of his life while stepping onto a bus. The answer just came to him. “I went on with the conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty,” he later wrote. Erica sometimes had little revelations like that, too, while she was parking the car or making a cup of tea.

  Like all artists and craftsmen, she was a plaything of the muses. Creativity seemed to happen in a hidden world beyond her control. The poet Amy Lowell wrote, “An idea will come into my head for no apparent reason; ‘The Bronze Horses,’ for instance. I register the horses as a good subject for a poem; and, having so registered them, I consciously thought no more about the matter. But what I had really done was to drop my subject into the subconscious, much as one drops a letter into the mailbox. Six months later, the words of the poem began to come into my head, the poem—to use my private vocabulary—was ‘there.’ ”

  Erica learned little tricks to stoke the unreachable furnace. Art, as Wordsworth put it, is emotion recollected in tranquility. Erica had to put herself in a state in which her emotions bubbled to the surface. She had to go see a thrilling play, or climb a mountain, or read a tragedy. Then, her heart a-tingle, she had to be relaxed enough to express the feelings welling up inside.

  As she had gotten older, she found she needed long periods of uninterrupted solitude for her conscious mind to slowly relax and surrender itself to the pulses generated inside. One interruption could ruin her mind-set for an entire day.

  She found that this creative mind-set was most likely to come late in the morning or early in the evening. She would work with her headphones on, playing soft classical music to loosen her thoughts. She needed to be near windows, with a view of distant horizons. For some reason she worked best in her dining room, which faced south, not in her studio.

  She also learned that when you are trying something new, it is best to do it quickly and wrong, and then go back and do it over and over again. And at rare and precious moments, she even got a sense of what athletes and artists must have meant when they talked about being in the flow. The narrative voice in her head went silent. She lost track of time. The tool seemed to guide her. She integrated with her task.

  What did she get out of all this? Did it improve her brain? Well, there is some evidence that children who participate in arts education experience a small IQ boost, just as there is some evidence that participating in music and drama classes seems to improve social skills. But these results are sketchy, and it is not true that just listening to Mozart or going to a museum will make you smarter.

  Did Erica’s creativity help her live longer? A bit. There is substantial evidence to suggest that mental stimulation improves longevity. People with college degrees live longer than people without, even after controlling for other factors. Nuns with college degrees live longer, even though their lifestyles through adulthood are the same as nuns without them. People with larger vocabularies in adolescence are less likely to suffer dementia in old age. According to one California study, seniors who participate in arts programs require fewer doctor visits, use fewer medications, and generally experience better health than seniors who don’t.

  But the real rewards were spiritual. It’s said that people who go into therapy do it either because they need tightening (their behavior is too erratic) or because they need loosening (they are too repressed). Erica needed loosening. Reading poetry, visiting museums, and carving seemed to help her do it.

  As she relaxed she became more patient, more of a wandering explorer. Summarizing a body of recent research, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that artists who succeed in their youth tend to be conceptual. Like Picasso, they start with a concept of what they want to achieve and then execute it. Those that thrive near the end of life tend to be exploratory. Like Cezanne, they don’t start with clear conceptions, but go through a process of trial and error that eventually leads them to a destination.

  This is not always a passive, gentle process. In 1972 the great art historian Kenneth Clark wrote an essay on what he called the “old-age style.” Looking across the arts, and especially at Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Donatello, Turner, and Cezanne, he believed he could detect a common pattern that many great elderly artists shared: “A sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.… If we consider old-age art from a more narrowly stylistic point of view, we find a retreat from realism, an impatience with established technique and a craving for complete unity of treatment, as if the picture were an organism in which every member shared in the life of the whole.”

  Erica obviously did not have these masters’ genius, nor their inner turbulence. But she did have a desire to push hard through her final years and create surprises for herself. Erica found that the arts gave her access to her deeper regions. Artists take the sentiments that are buried in inchoate form across many minds and bring them to the surface for all to see. They express the collective emotional wisdom of the race. They keep alive and transmit states of mind from one generation to the next. “We pass on culture, therefore,” Roger Scruton has written, “as we pass on science and skill: not to benefit the individual, but to benefit our kind, by conserving a form of knowledge that would otherwise vanish from the world.”

  You Are There

  One summer, a couple of years after retirement, Harold and Erica took the best vacation of their lives. They traveled around France looking at cathedrals. Harold prepared for the trip for a few months, reading up on cathedral construction and medieval history, just as he had back at school. He put different passages of the books he was reading on his computer tablet, to take with him, and he planned an itinerary and outlined a narration for their entire voyage. His n
arration would be just like the old presentations he used to give at work, except this time he’d be talking about architecture and chivalry, and they’d be walking through towns and churches as he spoke.

  Harold didn’t spend a lot of time memorizing the names of the kings and the processions of battles. He operated under the assumption that each group and each age inadvertently produce their own symbolic system—buildings, organizations, teachings, practices, and stories—and then people live within the moral and intellectual structure of those symbols, without really thinking about it. So when Harold talked about medieval life, he was just trying to capture what it felt like to be the sort of person who lived at that time. As he put it, he wasn’t describing the fish; he was describing the water they swam in.

  Harold loved this sort of educational travel. He could touch and feel the past—the darkness of an old building in daytime, the mildew of a castle keep, the glimpse of a forest through the slit of a castle lookout. With these prompts flooding his mind, he could imaginatively enter into other ages.

  They traveled through Caen and Reims and Chartres. They’d walk side by side, Harold whispering information from the books he had read, speaking as much for his own pleasure as for hers. “Life was more extreme then,” he said at one point. “There were extremes of summer heat and winter cold, with few conveniences to temper them. There were extremes of light and darkness, health and sickness. Political boundaries were arbitrary and changed with the death of a king or lord. Government was hodgepodge with different mixtures of custom and Roman and Church law. One year could produce plenty and the next, famine, and it was possible to walk from one town where times were good to another where people were starving. One in three people were under fourteen and the life expectancy was forty, so there was no great throng of people in their forties, fifties, or sixties to sort of calm things down.

  “As a result, their life was more emotionally intense than ours is today. On festival days, they celebrated with a drunken joy that we scarcely seem to know. On the other hand, they could succumb to mind-grabbing terror that we only remember from childhood. They were capable of enjoying tender love stories one moment and then cheering as a beggar was dismembered the next. Their perception of tears and suffering and color itself seems to have been more vivid. There were certain modulating ideas that we take for granted that they did not have in their mental toolbox. They didn’t have a concept for diminished capacity, the idea that a mentally disabled person might not be fully responsible for his actions. They didn’t have a concept for judicial fallibility, or for the idea that criminals should be rehabilitated instead of simply being made to suffer. For them it was all extremes—guilt or innocence, salvation or damnation.”

  Harold and Erica were walking through the village of Chartres as he said this, and crossing toward the cathedral. They walked across a square with coffee shops, and Harold described how the medieval Frenchmen of the twelfth century lived in squalor and filth, and yet yearned for an ideal world. They constructed elaborate codes of chivalry and courtly love. He described the intricate rules of courtesy that governed everyday court life, the profusion of rituals, the many organizations that required oaths and other sacred rites, the stately procession in which each participant in the social order had his or her own socially approved fabric, color scheme, and place.

  “It was almost as if they were putting on a play for themselves. It was almost as if they were turning their short, squalid lives into a dream,” Harold continued. He said that tournaments were supposed to be stylized, though in reality they were often shambolic brawls. Love was supposed to be stylized, though often it was just brutal rape. In imagination everything was turned into a mythical ideal version of itself, though in reality there was degradation and stench all around.

  “They had a great yearning for beauty and a great faith in God and the ideal world. And somehow that great faith produced this,” Harold said, gesturing up at the Chartres cathedral. He described how nobles and peasants would volunteer their labor to build the great church, how whole villages would move close to the cathedral town so they could help create these great edifices soaring above the normal hovels of wood and grass.

  He described the intricate recurring patterns of tracery, the recursive rhythm of arches, the countless replicating folds of stone, each reflecting and magnifying the last. They spent an hour before the west front, tracing the symbols of the Trinity carved into the central door, the way Christ’s body is connected to the signs of the zodiac and the labors of the month on the ascension door. As much as he could, Harold described the great bombardment of symbols and meaning that would have rained down on the illiterate pilgrims, setting off strings of associations and awe in their minds.

  Inside, he described the revolutionary splendor of the design. Through most of history until the twelfth century, men had constructed buildings to be heavy and formidable. Now here they constructed buildings to be light and weightless. They used stones to create a feeling for the spiritual. “Man may rise to the contemplation of the divine through the senses,” Abbot Suger wrote.

  Harold loved teaching. He loved being a tour guide more than anything he had ever done. On odd occasions, talking about this or that historical scene, he’d find himself strangely moved. People in centuries past, he came to believe, devoted more energy to the sacred. They spent more time building sacred spaces, and practicing sacred rituals. They built gateways to a purer mode of existence. Harold was drawn to these ancient places and gateways—to ruins, cathedrals, palaces, and holy grounds—more than to any modern place or living city. In Europe especially, he divided cities between those that were living, like Frankfurt, and those that were dead, like Bruges and Venice. He liked the dead cities best.

  After an hour or so inside the cathedral, Harold and Erica left and began walking back to dinner. As they did, they passed the west portals, and saw a range of statues arrayed about the doorways. Harold knew nothing about them. They were church elders of some sort. Or maybe donors, or scholars or heroes from the ancient past. Erica paused unexpectedly to look at them. Their bodies were elongated cylinders, with gracefully carved draping robes. Their gestures mimicked one another, one hand down around the waist and the other clutching something by the neck. But it was the faces that caught Harold’s attention.

  Some of the statues they had seen on the trip were generic and impersonal. The artists had tried to symbolize a person’s face rather than represent a particular one. But these sculptures depicted real people, idiosyncratic and ensouled. Their faces held different expressions of selflessness, detachment, patience, and acquiescence. They were the product of a specific set of personal experiences and reflected a unique set of hopes and ideals. Though he was tired after a long day, Harold actually experienced a chill looking into those faces and eyes. He had the sensation that they saw him; that they sympathized with him and gazed at him gazing at them. Historians sometimes speak of moments of historical ecstasy, the feeling that magically comes over them when the distance of the centuries disappears, and they have the astonishing sensation of direct contact with the past. Harold felt something like that now, and Erica could see a glow on his cheeks.

  It was a wonderful day, and an exhausting one. At nightfall they went to a restaurant and had a long, happy meal. Erica was struck by how enchanted the world seemed to people in the Middle Ages. For us, the night sky is filled with distant balls of fire and vast empty space. But for them, it was alive with creatures and magic. The stones of the church and the trees in the woods resonated with spirits, ghosts, and divine presences. The cathedrals were not just buildings—they were like spiritual powerhouses, places where heaven and earth met. People back then seemed voracious for mythology, she observed. They blended Greek, Roman, Christian, and pagan myths together, regardless of internal logic, and made everything alive. Even the bones of saints had magical powers. It was as if every material thing was crystallized with a spiritual presence; every aesthetic thing was also a sacred thing. Our
world seems disenchanted in comparison, she thought with a sigh.

  Harold mentioned how much fun he was having. Somehow knowledge only came alive to him when he was teaching it to somebody, and at the end he mused that maybe he’d missed his calling as a tour guide. Erica gave him an energized look. “Would you like to be?”

  That night they hatched a plan. Harold would lead tours for small groups of cultivated travelers. Maybe they’d conduct three a year. He’d study a period for a few months, just as he had with the Middle Ages, and then take a group to France or Turkey or the Holy Land. They’d contract with a tour company so they wouldn’t have to worry too much about the travel arrangements. Erica could run the rest of the operation. It would be their postretirement small business. Erica figured they could compete with the alumni groups that run these sort of tours, because theirs would be more intimate. They’d rely mostly on friends, so the travelers would pretty much know one another before they signed up.

  And that’s pretty much what happened for the next eight years. They created a company called You Are There Tours, which was like a traveling course in human civilization, with nice hotels and wine. They’d be at home for a few months and Harold would bury himself in his books, preparing. And then they’d take two weeks off with a group, getting an all-expenses-paid educational vacation in Greece or some other spot on the itinerary of human accomplishment. Harold loved it. For Harold, the preparation for the trips was actually better than the trips themselves. Three times a year, Erica got to experience intense bursts of learning. When she was on those trips, time would slow down. She’d notice a thousand novel things. It was like feeling the pores of her skin open.