Skip to main content

Emotional Education


Book Review

Title: The School of Life
Author: Alain de Botton and 18 others
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 310
Price in India: Rs 699

Human evolution has been one-sided. The brain continues to evolve while the heart remains savage. While we are able to construct skyscrapers and flyovers, explore stars that lie zillions of kilometres away, and work with the minutest subatomic particles, the ancient savage feelings of hatred and vindictiveness, envy and greed, egotism and lust, refuse to leave our hearts. The heart stands in need of effective education. Here is a book that attempts to provide that education.

Interestingly, it is a book written by a group of writers numbering to 19 in all counting the one who wrote the introduction. These writers are philosophers and psychologists who call themselves The School of Life which is also the title of this book. The objective of this organisation of writers is to promote emotional education and global well-being.

If you have already read a dozen or so motivational books of a good standard, you may find much repetition here. But that is not a drawback. There is hardly anything new to teach about life. From the Gautama Buddha to George Santayana, we have had infinite teachers and thinkers who told us more or less the same things in different words. If our hearts have remained as primitive as the first of the homo sapiens, the repetition of lessons for the heart is unavoidable.

We don’t want to learn these essential lessons. The introduction to this book says that “we have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves.” There are certain lessons which are vital but we don’t want to learn them. This book reminds us of those lessons yet again.

The book is divided into 5 parts: Self, Others, Relationships, Work, and Culture. How to improve our life with respect to each of these is what the book speaks about. The book is written in a simple language that anyone can understand. There is no jargon from philosophy or psychology though the writers belong to those fields. Since it is written by diverse writers, the style changes occasionally and some parts are not as gripping as others. On the whole, it is very inspiring.

“What separates the sane insane from the simply insane is the honest, personable and accurate grasp they have on what is not entirely right with them,” the introduction says. [emphasis added] We are all insane to some degree. It is perhaps impossible to be absolutely sane. What we can do is to understand our insanity and come to terms with the fears, doubts, longings, desires and habits that drive our insanity. The book helps us to do that.

Even if you have read many motivational or self-help books, this one is still recommended if only to remind ourselves of certain basic truths about human life. The added advantage is that this book tells it in a little different way. Let me conclude with a quote from the book as an example of what it offers and how:

“The wise don’t envy idly, realizing that there are some good reasons why they don’t have many of the things they really want. They look at the tycoon or the star and have a decent grasp of why they weren’t able to succeed at this level. I seems like just an accident, an unfair one, but there were in fact some logical reasons.
   At the same time, the wise see that some destinies are truly shaped by nothing more than accident. Some people are promoted randomly. Companies that aren’t especially deserving can suddenly make it big. Some people have the right parents. The winners aren’t all noble and good. The wise appreciate the role of luck and don’t curse themselves overly at those junctures where they have evidently not had as much of it as they would have liked.”

PS. My motivational e-book Coping with Suffering is available here.

Comments

  1. DashyJune 22, 2020 at 1:47 PM

    Interesting thoughts. It is indeed great wisdom to not curse oneself for lack of luck. I don't usually read motivational or self-help books, I'm yet to step into the genre.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 22, 2020 at 1:55 PM

      Some of the motivational books are really good. Some are trash. John Powell was my favourite when i was a young student. I bought this one out of curiosity because it's written by 19 writers.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Chitrakoot: Antithesis of Ayodhya

Illustration by MS Copilot Designer Chitrakoot is all that Ayodhya is not. It is the land of serenity and spiritual bliss. Here there is no hankering after luxury and worldly delights. Memory and desire don’t intertwine here producing sorrow after sorrow. Situated in a dense forest, Chitrakoot is an abode of simplicity and austerity. Ayodhya’s composite hungers have no place here. Let Ayodhya keep its opulence and splendour, its ambitions and dreams. And its sorrows as well. Chitrakoot is a place for saints like Atri and Anasuya. Atri is one of the Saptarishis and a Manasputra of Brahma. Brahma created the Saptarishis through his mind to help maintain cosmic order and spread wisdom. Anasuya is his wife, one of the most chaste and virtuous women in Hindu mythology. Her virtues were so powerful that she could transmute the great Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva into infants when they came to test her chastity. Chitrakoot is the place where asceticism towers above even divinit...
22 comments
Read more

Why do good to others?

Courtesy: polyp.org.uk “Most people would rather die than think and most people do,” said Bertrand Russell in his characteristic witty way.   Professor of Philosophy and author of many books, A C Grayling, is of the opinion that religion has continued to survive even in today’s scientific world because people don’t want to think.   They would rather accept readymade answers given by religion.   God is the ultimate readymade answer for a whole lot of problems.   And a very easy answer too. If we really think and evolve our own moral systems instead of borrowing them from religion, we will be far better human beings, says Grayling in his latest book, The God Argument.   If we think sensibly (common sense would do if we cared to use that faculty), we will realise that we all have a duty to contribute to the welfare of the entire human species.   The simple logic is that when the species is “flourishing” (Grayling’s word) we too flourish.   ...
33 comments
Read more