David Brooks on soft skills

In the Sept. 5, 2015, New York Times, eloquent David Brooks again has an interesting column titled 'The New Romantics.'

Consider the burgeoning use of technology in use today: classrooms, medicine, commerce, even friendship. Yet Brooks sees a door opening to a possible romantic rebirth. Although computers now do much of our work for us, it is possible to consider that this gives us time to turn mundane tasks over to technology, and enjoy more time fir the relational tasks of life, including those that require accountability, authority, or roles such as being a caregiver. These are not transactional jobs, but relational ones, best left to humans, and requiring judgment, empathy, communication, compassion, and courage. The world still needs us!

Read Brooks' column, The New Romantics.

Oh, to write like David Brooks...

In a recent New York Times op-ed page essay, David Brooks wrote about an interesting passage in a biography of Isaiah Berlin. It was in Leningrad in 1945 when Berlin was invited to meet a pre-revolutionary poet, twenty years past his age. The next four paragraphs are a mini-movie, as Brooks teases us to read on and on. Let me just share the beginning line of each paragraph, like so...

Berlin was taken to her apartment, and met a woman still beautiful and powerful, but wounded by tyranny and the war...

By midnight, they were alone, sitting on opposite ends of her room...

By four in the morning, they were talking about the greats...

Deeper and deeper they talked, baring their souls...

In the next seven paragraphs of this thin newspaper column, Brooks discusses how spiritually ambitious people can experience that sort of life-altering conversation, and the "ideal of a certain sort of bond... that happens once or twice in a lifetime."

Please read David Brooks' essay, and enjoy the opportunities for real communication among friends or strangers who become friends, and perhaps capture "the numinous magic of that night" in your own life.