The False Summit

This is the chapter that comes after the chapter that closed with that is no small thing, that is everything. That ending was real. What survived the fire is real. The inventory you took, item by item, of what was left after the burn, is real. None of it is being taken away by what is about to happen.

What is about to happen is something else.

There is a moment, somewhere in the weeks or months after a person has taken the inventory of what survived the fire and begun to feel the relief of having taken it, when a smaller thing breaks. A piece of news. A failed conversation. A bill that arrives just as you had thought you were clear of bills. A symptom that returns. A memory that surfaces and will not go back down. A relationship that you had counted as one of the survivors turns out to have a hairline crack you had not noticed and breaks along it, quietly, in a single afternoon.

You sit in whatever room you are sitting in and you think, with the kind of quiet that is louder than any other kind, not again.

That is the chapter you are now in.

THE FALSE SUMMIT

Climbers know this experience. You toil up a slope. The summit is ahead of you. You can see it. You can almost touch the cairn at the top. You make the last hard pitch. You arrive. You catch your breath. You look around. And you see, rising behind what you had taken to be the summit, another peak, higher, harder, with a route you cannot yet read.

The peak you were just on was not the summit. It was a false summit. The real summit was concealed by the false one until you had climbed the false one and were standing on it. There is no shame in this. The mountain is built this way. Every serious climber has been fooled, multiple times, by false summits. Some mountains are made entirely of false summits, one after another, until the climber stops asking which one is real and just keeps climbing.

The Fire was not a false summit. The Fire was the descent. What is happening to you now is the false summit. The false summit comes after the descent. The false summit is what you stand on while you discover that the climbing is not over.

You are not, strictly, lost again. You are more accurately lost than you have been before. The first lostness was a coarse lostness. You did not know what was happening or why. The second lostness is a fine lostness. You know what is happening. You can name it. You can place it in the architecture of your life. And it is, in some way you cannot yet articulate, more painful for being more legible.

WHAT THE OLD BOOKS KNEW

The shock you are feeling is not new. It has been described, with great precision, by writers thousands of years older than this book.

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes saw it first and said it most plainly.

Read that twice. There is no new thing under the sun. The second loss is not a new loss. It is the same loss in new clothes. The first loss came from outside. The second loss comes from inside. Or the first loss came from inside and the second from outside. The geometry rotates. The loss remains. The Preacher had seen the rotation enough times that it had stopped surprising him. By the time he wrote the line, he was no longer angry that the rotation existed. He was just naming it.

You can be angry that the rotation exists. That is the season you are in. Anger at a structural feature of reality is one of the perfectly ordinary stations on the way through it. You are not less wise for being angry. You are wiser than you were six months ago and angrier than you have ever been. Both can be true. Both are true.

Job, who endured what is sometimes considered the model of the second loss, said something that has been quoted for three thousand years and is rarely heard correctly.

The line is usually read as resignation. It is not resignation. It is recognition. Job is naming the structure. Things are given. Things are taken away. The taking-away is not personal. It is part of the giving. To love what was given means, eventually, to be present at its taking. He is not saying he is glad. He is saying he sees what is.

Later, when his wife tells him to curse God and die, Job answers with the question that the False Summit chapter rests on.

Notice what is missing from that question. There is no exit. There is no or. The question presumes that the same hand that gives is the same hand that takes, and that there is no version of being alive in which only one of those happens. You receive good. Then you receive evil. Then good again. Then evil. The False Summit is the first time you fully understand that the line on which you are standing is the same line you walked through the Fire on.

Boethius, sitting in a Roman prison waiting for execution, was visited (in his own account) by Lady Philosophy, who said this to him:

The sentence is not consolation in the soft sense. It is consolation in the sense of correcting an error. Boethius had been counting his happiness in things that could be taken: position, library, family, freedom, life. Lady Philosophy is not telling him to be at peace. She is telling him he was, all along, counting wrong. The False Summit is where you discover, painfully, that the inventory you took at the end of the Fire still contained items that could be taken. That what survived the Fire was not, in every case, what cannot be taken.

The Fire teaches you what burns. The False Summit teaches you what can still burn.

It is a finer lesson, taught later, because the coarser lesson had to be taught first.

Milton, three hundred years before any psychologist had a vocabulary for what the False Summit feels like from the inside, gave the line to Satan after the fall.

It is, on the surface, a brave line. It is also the line of someone who has just lost everything and is standing on the false summit of that loss, declaring it a victory. Milton hears the bravado underneath. The mind that talks itself into Heaven from a cell is the same mind that talked itself into a cell when it was free. The False Summit is the chapter in which you discover that this voice still lives in you. It will say, in your own register, that this loss was the real win, that the new bareness is enlightenment, that the smaller life you have been forced into is what you wanted all along. Some of that may even be true. The work of the False Summit is to learn to tell the true sentence from the proud one without throwing both away.

THE UNDERGROUND MAN

There is a particular shape the False Summit takes when the second loss comes from inside.

A century and a half ago, a Russian writer described it with such accuracy that no one has improved on the description. Dostoevsky's narrator in Notes from Underground is the residue. He is the part of you that survives all the inventory-taking and rebuilding and remains, somehow, the part of you that wants to throw the whole thing away.

These are the first three sentences of the book. The narrator says them about himself, not as confession, but as report. The Underground Man is the version of yourself that you thought the Fire had burned out and that, several months into your supposed rebuilding, you discover is still living in the basement.

He does not believe in the inventory. He does not believe in the survival. He believes, deep in the place where belief lives without your permission, that the rebuilding is a fraud and that you are a fraud for attempting it. He surfaces during the False Summit because the False Summit is when he has the strongest argument. See, he says. I told you.

The false comfort the Fire offers is the belief that, having burned, you have been simplified. You have not. The Underground Man is what is left of your complications. He is the part of you that the Fire could not reach because the Fire was too hot to find him. He waits out the Fire in a corner of your interior architecture you did not know existed, and when the Fire is done and you have walked out of the rubble believing yourself purified, he comes up the stairs in his slippers and sits down at your kitchen table and asks you how the rebuilding is going.

You will not get rid of him. You should stop trying. The False Summit is the chapter in which you make a different kind of peace with him. Not friendship. Cohabitation.

He is not your enemy. He is your witness. He is the part of you that refuses to let the rebuilding pretend it is more complete than it is. If you listen to him without obeying him, he becomes useful. If you obey him, he ruins you. If you ignore him, he sabotages you. The middle path is to let him speak and not let him drive.

The Compass, which is what comes next in this book, cannot be built without him in the room.

THIS IS THE SPIRAL, NOT THE FAILURE

The False Summit feels like failure because you reach it expecting to have arrived. You reach it because you have been climbing. The reaching itself is real progress. The disappointment at the next peak is a function of the route, not of you.

This is the spiral.

The spiral is discussed, in greater detail, in a later chapter of this book called The Return. It is being introduced now, ahead of schedule, because the False Summit is where the spiral starts. The first time you stand on a false summit, you think you have failed. The second time, you remember you have been here before, and you can almost name the air. The fifth time, you have stopped being surprised. The tenth time, you have begun to recognize the false summit as a place with its own weather and its own kindness and its own usefulness, and you walk across it and start the next pitch without much commentary.

You will get there. Not yet, but you will get there. Right now you are on your first or second false summit, and the work of this chapter is not to talk you out of being upset. The work of this chapter is to tell you, plainly, that being upset on a false summit is the correct emotional response and that the next pitch begins after you have caught your breath.

The Old Testament writer who said there is no new thing under the sun was not mocking you. He was, at three thousand years' distance, sitting next to you on the false summit, with his own cup of cold water, telling you what he had seen. The False Summit is the chair he is offering you. It is uncomfortable on purpose. You are meant to sit in it for a while.

ALL THINGS PASS

The False Summit also passes.

Everything in this book passes. The Fire passed. The inventory passed. The relief of taking the inventory passed. The False Summit will pass. The next pitch will reveal another false summit, and that one will pass. The pattern is not your failure. The pattern is reality. The wise people who wrote the books quoted in this chapter were trying to tell you that the pattern itself is the thing you can rest in, even when the individual moments inside the pattern are intolerable.

A river meets a stone and goes around it.

A river meets a cliff and falls.

A river meets a desert and seeps in and waits.

A river that meets the False Summit goes around it the way a river goes around any other obstacle: by not stopping, by not insisting, by yielding to the shape that is in front of it without deciding in advance that the shape is a betrayal. The False Summit is not the betrayal of the journey. The False Summit is the journey.

Seek and you shall find. The seeking does not end at the peak. The seeking begins again at the false peak, with the discovery that there was a peak hidden behind the peak. The seeking is the way the door stays open. If you stop seeking at the false summit, the door closes. If you keep seeking, the door opens again, sometimes in the next breath, sometimes in the next year, sometimes ten years from now in a city you have not yet moved to. The seeking is not the way to win. The seeking is the way to stay in the conversation.

NOW YOU ARE READY

You were not ready, when you reached the end of the Fire chapter, to begin building the Compass. You thought you were. You were not.

What you needed, between the inventory and the construction, was the lesson the False Summit teaches, which is this: the inventory you took was honest, and it was incomplete, and the part it missed is the part that can never be inventoried, because the part it missed is the part of you that keeps making inventories.

You are not lost. You are between summits. The Compass section, which begins after this chapter ends, is built by people who have been on at least one false summit and have come down off it without throwing the climb away. That is who you are now. That is who you are eligible to be.

The next chapter says, in its first line, we have burned the maps. That line is still true. It is more true now than it was before this chapter, because you have spent these pages discovering that even after the maps are burned, there is still terrain. The terrain has its own falsehoods, its own surprises, its own hidden peaks. You will need an instrument that can read terrain without a map.

The instrument is the Compass.

You build it from what survived the Fire and what survived the False Summit.

You are about to begin.