Ain't life elemental?

Alexander Granach as Renfield in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922).

Looks like we won't get to find out how David Brooks responds to the white-terrorist attack on the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, the papal encyclical Laudato Si, or Donald Trump's presidential campaign, all questions of some spiritual interest, because he's still on that book tour (Oregonians can catch him this weekend at branches of Powells) and hasn't got time to look at the papers unless he has special orders, as in Tuesday's TPP column (for which, as I've suggested, somebody else must have done the reading and all he needed to do was to lay out the index cards on the hotel-room shag and then type them up).

Instead what we get is another installment in the crowd-sourced characterology museum he started last month, where visitors to the Road to Character website record the ways in which they found a purpose in life, and then he cuts them up and pins them to the wall with bits of his own prose for continuity:

A few thousand wrote essays. I was struck by how elemental life is.

I know right. I would have expected it to be more molecular.

Most people found their purpose either through raising children or confronting illness or death.

Can we have some statistics on that? Like what kind of majority, and how did it divide up between the two, or three, as the case may be? And any clue how representative your sample was? And any control group of people who raised children and/or confronted illness or death and failed to find a purpose in life?

The essays from teachers ring with special clarity and force. Many of them see clearly how their day-to-day activities are in line with their ultimate end.

As you know whenever you spend a day managing an eighth-grade classroom and when it's over you say, "Death, where is thy sting?"

Many people don’t necessarily see their lives as pointing toward God or as defined by some mission statement. They seek to drink in life at full volume, to experience and help others richly.

Jae Brown was driving after smoking weed and drinking when he was pulled over.

"Sorry officer, I was drinking in life at full volume." No, it's Brooks suddenly changing lanes to swerve away from a tragically piled-up metaphor collision, with one of the verbs, "drink", getting dragged into the next paragraph like roadkill on the wheel.

He confessed everything to the cop, who saw that Brown was in college and whispered, “Don’t let your friends get you in trouble you can’t get yourself out of,” and let him go. “My purpose in life,” Brown writes, “is to mentor, provide that whisper in someone’s ear that changes their life.”

Which has little to do with raising children or confronting illness or death, but then so do four or five of the seven examples in today's column (I think he may be counting teaching as a form of child-rearing in example no. 2).

The great struggle in essay after essay is to remain emotionally vital and intellectually alive.

Indeed. And sometimes it's a losing battle. And then there's the Renfield syndrome:

For many people, the purpose of life is to have more life. That may not have defined people’s purpose in past eras, when it might have had more to do with the next life, or obedience to a creed. But many today seek to live with hearts wide open.

Or mouths. I mean how elemental can you get?

Facebook page of The Road to Character. Looks like no, he won't be responding any time soon. I wonder if anybody asks about it at the signings? (No, I'm not daring you, and I wouldn't do it myself.)