The Social Animal by David Brooks Page A

do his homework. He wanted to be a good student and please his teachers and his mother and father. But he was just unable. He somehow couldn’t help that his backpack was a mess and his life was disorganized. Sitting at the table, he couldn’t control his own attention. Something would happen by the sink and he’d check it out. Some stray thought would drive him toward the refrigerator, or to an envelope that happened to be lying near the coffee machine.
    Far from being free, Harold was now a victim of the remnants of his own lantern consciousness, distracted by every stray prompt, unable to regulate his responses. He was smart enough to sense that he was spinning out of control. He could not reverse the turmoil welling up inside. So he would get frustrated and think he was bad.
    Some evenings, to be honest, Julia made these moments worse by losing patience. At these tired, frustrated moments, she just told Harold to buckle down and get it over with. Why couldn’t he complete these simple assignments, which he knew how to do, which should have been so easy for him?
    That never worked.
    But Julia had other resources. When Julia was young, her family moved around a lot. She switched schools and sometimes had trouble making new friends. At those times, she threw herself at her own mother, and relied on her company. They would take long walks together, and go out for tea together, and her mother, who was lonely, too, in the new neighborhood and had nobody she could talk to, would open up. She would tell young Julia about her nervousness in the new place, what she liked about it and what she didn’t, what she missed and what she looked forward to. Julia felt privileged when her mother opened up in this manner. She was just a little girl at the time, but she had access to an adult viewpoint. She felt she was being admitted into a special realm.
    Julia lived a very different life than the one her mother did. It was much easier in many respects. She spent an insane amount of time on superficialities—shopping for the right guest-room hand towels, following celebrity gossip. But she still had some of those internal working models in her head. Without thinking about it, without even realizing that she was replicating her mother’s behavior, Julia sometimes would share her own special experiences with Harold. She wouldn’t really think about it, but often when they were both on edge, when times were hard, she would just find herself talking about some adventure she’d had when she was young. She would give him privileged access into her life.
    This particular evening, Julia saw Harold strangely alone, struggling with the stimuli and the random impulses within. She instinctively pulled him in, and brought him a bit inside her own life.
    She told him a story. She told him, of all things, about a drive she had taken across the country with some friends after college. She described the rhythms of that drive, where they had stayed night after night, how the Appalachians had given way to the plains and then the Rockies. She described what it was like to wake up in the morning and see mountains in the distance and then drive for hours and still not reach them. She described the string of Cadillacs she had seen planted upright along the highway.
    As she did this, his eyes were rapt upon her. She was treating him with respect and letting him into that most mysterious region—the hidden zone of his mother’s life that had existed before his birth. His time horizon subtly widened. He got subtle intimations of his mother’s girlhood, her maturity, his arrival, his growth, this moment now, and the adventures he would someday have.
    And as Julia talked, she was tidying up. She was clearing space on the counters, removing the boxes and stray letters that had piled up during the day. Harold leaned in toward her, as if she were offering him water after a thirsty walk. Over the years, Harold had learned how to use her as a tool to organize