David Brooks is Back !!

After a self-induced hiatus of three months, he is back this week with two great columns:

How much emotional and psychic space should politics take up in a normal healthy brain?

I figure that unless you are in the business of politics, covering it or columnizing about it, politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture and fun. I wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance, and that the emotional register around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature.

Reviews one of the most important book of the year -Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It: by Jennifer Michael Hecht:

I’d only add that the suicidal situation is an ironical situation. A person enters the situation amid feelings of powerlessness and despair, but once in the situation the potential suicide has the power to make a series of big points before the world. By deciding to live, a person in a suicidal situation can prove that life isn’t just about racking up pleasure points; it is a vale of soul-making, and suffering can be turned into wisdom. A person in that situation can model endurance and prove to others that, as John Milton put it, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

That person can commit to live to redeem past mistakes. That person can show that we are not completely self-determining creatures, and do not have the right to choose when we end our participation in the common project of life.