David Brooks speaks about hard-learned wisdom to standing-room-only audience at Copperfield's in Petaluma

Engulfed in the throes at the end of a 27-year marriage, David Brooks lingered in his agony, hoping to learn from a divorce that he conceded was his own making.

“I suffered my way to wisdom,” he said.

The conservative columnist for the New York Times shared some of the reflections captured in his latest book, “The Second Mountain,” with a standing-?room-only audience at Copperfield’s Books in downtown Petaluma last Thursday. The event was hosted by Literacyworks, a local nonprofit that advocates for childhood literacy and lifelong learning.

Brooks, 57, spoke about his quest for a moral life since his divorce six years ago, and how his ascent up the first mountain of life, one shaped by a culture obsessed with individual success, had left his relationships hollow.

“In my view, that leads to an unsustainable life,” Brooks said. “You get to the top of your mountain, you have great career success, and you find it, ‘Well, this is unsatisfying. This is not what I thought it was going to be.’ Or you fail, or something happens that you didn’t expect … and you find the desires of the ego are not that great.”

The writer’s message of midlife transformation was embraced by audience members that often punctuated his pontifications with affirmative exhales like a congregation at church.

In the valley of his depression, Brooks said he realized his kitchen cupboards were filled with notepads rather than dinnerware, and his interactions were based on efficiency instead of depth.

He mentioned how his first wife would take “an hour-and-a-half” to leave a party because she valued relationships over time, and he was the opposite.

“I came to desire the wrong things,” Brooks said. “My main problem was I came to desire time over people. I had this productivity thing in my head, a clock, so I was always on the move.”

He emerged from that period of his life with a new desire for cultivating the type of meaningful relationships he once ignored, and weaving into the social fabric of his community by lifting up others.

This was the “second mountain” at the heart of his fifth book, a character guide to finding joy.

“If the first mountain is about defining the ego and finding the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego,” Brooks said. “It’s life after the valley where you’re happy to lose yourself. The first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.”

Two years ago, Brooks married his second wife, Anne Snyder, his former research assistant and now a fellow author.

A political and cultural commentator for PBS NewsHour and NPR, Brooks is one of the most widely syndicated columnists in the U.S., frequently opining about his moderate conservative beliefs and profound social theories.

Brooks has often been criticized for applying broad brushstrokes to help narrate much of his work, and using social psychology to dull the context surrounding issues like poverty or foreign policy.

However, he said he fell away from the Republican Party establishment in 2013, and is no stranger to criticizing President Donald Trump.

Even after his journey along the second mountain, with more humility and morality in tow, Brooks described the gravity of his political beliefs in the reviews that have been following his current book tour, and warned that placing too much weight in politics can be disastrous to creating the sort of interconnectedness he now champions.

“For a lot of people, politics has almost become a religion, and they want ultimate salvation from it,” Brooks said. “If you treat it as a religion, you begin to treat it as a battle between the saved and the damned.”

(Contact News Editor Yousef Baig at yousef.baig@arguscourier.com or 776-8461, and on Twitter @YousefBaig.)