The Road to Character

You are not worthy. Being born so late in time, you missed the opportunity to grow up with puritanical values. You must search inside yourself, but that is not where the answer is.

Wow. I struggled with this book. The snippets into great lives were interesting - people like Francis Perkins, President Eisenhower, George Marshall, “George Eliot”. The rest of the book, although expected due to the title and intended goals, felt preachy to me.

The book ends on a note of joy, that one may find it in a life of duty and self control. However, none of the portrayed lives show any semblance of joy. Moreover, they were described again and again as choosing some service or other over joy. I'm not suggesting that we all live moment to moment with a short sighted approach, letting loose with our lust and gluttony. Rather, I'm saying that the content of the book does not align with the closing argument and that I think the heroic portrayal of people who do not seem outwardly happy for that end is not reasonable.

It's difficult to write a book on character without taking a strong opinion on what it takes to “have character”, but I felt like this one did. This left me without as much of a takeaway as I would have hoped. The main focus is on biographies of various people, looking into how they lived. The leading thread throughout these was relatively simple: develop your own beliefs, stick to them through the hard times, don't showboat and base your life on the journey rather than the outcome.

A book that would normally fall into ‘just-another-self-improvement-book' turns to be strikingly painful at times, when you realise you've been chasing the wrong gods. The things our inner selves really need, like.. “serene inner character, build a solid sense of right and wrong -not only do good -but be good.. love intimately -sacrifice self in the service of others to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive inner soul that honors creation and one's own possibilities.” tend to be last in our list of priorities.