Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom For Living A Better Life, by Eric Greitens

When I first started reading this book, I thought it would be the sort of book that would provide a look at resilience, at overcoming difficulty, and it did, in a manner of speaking. This is a book where the structure of the book, as artificial and contrived as it is, is of the utmost importance. The author is a retired Navy SEAL who finds great purpose in encouraging other veterans, and this book is written as a series of letters about various topics to a colleague of his who had left the service with a diagnosis of PTSD [1] and fallen into alcoholism with the threat of jail and absence from his wife and young children. The resulting book is a strange mixture of qualities, being both “real” in the sense that it represents a man-to-man talk about how to live life well despite one’s traumas and wounds, and also unreal in the sense that it is edited and somewhat artificial in its discussion.

The twenty-three letters that make up this sizable book of 380 pages cover a wide variety of topics: the frontline of a veteran at home, why and what is resilience, beginnings, happiness, models, identity, habits, responsibility, vocation, philosophy, practice, pain, mastering pain, reflection, friends, mentors, teams, leadership, freedom, story, death, and Sabbath. The author is fond of namedropping playwrights and philosophers, blending biblical insights with the lessons of Kung Fu movies and Eastern religious tradition, along with the stoic heroes of Roman history, and this book shows a wide range of reading. The book also is full of the warmth and compassion that people show to those they know, but what we see is almost entirely only one side of the conversation, the erudite and scholarly letters written by the author, with only fleeting quotes of the other side of the conversation, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the correspondent has taken responsibility and improved his life over the course of the lengthy letters, seeing as there is no way this correspondence happened quickly.

What is one to make of this book, though, as it is. The book is obviously not all-encompassing, as the author accurately notes that it contains little about marriage and fatherhood, seeing as the author himself does not feel competent to discuss such matters. The book leans heavily on philosophy and does not appear to be a particularly religious sort of person, although the sort of discipline and habit and care for others that the author praises are precisely what tends to be the approach of those who are genuinely religious. At its core, this book is based on a contradiction between the realization of mankind’s fallen state and the impossibility of perfection and the steadfast refusal to surrender to God, but rather to seek to be wise and powerful on one’s own terms, to be the master of one’s ship, the author of one’s path, the one who decides what knowledge to seek and what way to live. The resulting contradiction is that the author professes to be wise, while showing himself to be immensely foolish in striving to be his own god. The book is at its strongest when the author recognizes other authorities, but these insights are weakened by the author’s insistence in proclaiming his autonomy, even as he correctly notes that genuine manliness comes about as a result of service.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/a-republic-of-ingratitude/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/audiobook-review-marching-home/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/15/are-we-not-also-veterans-of-a-great-and-terrible-war/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/the-shadow-of-that-hideous-strength/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/book-review-the-ox-bow-incident/