of ambition and ego, and the peace that comes from having very little left to lose in this life. They are gentle because they have honestly faced the struggles given to them and have learned the hard way that personal survival is not the point. Their care is gentle because their self-aggrandizement is no longer at stake. There is nothing in it for them. Their vulnerability has been stretched to clear-eyed sensitivity to others and truly selfless love.
ETTY HILLESUM
I’d like to conclude this glimpse at second-mountain people with one more short portrait. It’s of a woman who, because of the freakish circumstances of her life, moved from her first to second mountain with dramatic speed. And because she kept a journal, we get a glimpse of what the shift from egocentric immaturity to selfless maturity looks like from the inside.
Her name was Etty Hillesum. She was born on January 15, 1914, and spent her teenage years in Deventer, a midsize city in eastern Holland. Her father was a shy, bookish man who worked as a principal of a local school but generally abstracted himself from the world and existed in the realm of lofty but vague ideas. Her mother, biographer Patrick Woodhouse writes, was needy: “chaotic, extravert and noisy, she was given to sudden emotional outbursts.”
Etty and her two brilliant but unstable brothers grew up in a home that was melodramatic, disorganized, and emotionally exhausting. In her diary, she describes her upbringing as a mixture of high culture and emotional barbarism:
I think my parents always felt out of their depth and as life became more and more difficult they were gradually so overwhelmed that they became quite incapable of making up their minds about anything. They gave us children too much freedom of action, and offered us nothing to cling to. That was because they never established a foothold for themselves. And the reason why they did so little to guard our steps was they themselves had lost the way.
Hillesum grew into an insecure and directionless young woman. In her late twenties, she would describe herself in her diaries as “a weakling and a nonentity adrift and tossed by the waves.” She felt “fragmented…depressed…a mass of uncertainties…Lack of self-confidence. Aversion. Panic.”
She had no structure to stabilize her life. She was nominally Jewish but not observant in any way. Nor did she have any intellectual sense of fixed truth or solid convictions. “My capable brain tells me that there are no absolutes, that everything is relative, endlessly diverse and in eternal motion.” She dreamed that some man would come along and give direction to her life. As she put it in her diary, “What I really want is a man for life. And to build something together with him. And all the adventures and transient relationships I have had have made me utterly miserable, tearing me apart.”
When Hillesum was twenty-six, the Nazis invaded Holland. In her early journal entries, the occupation appeared as the backdrop, something that never pierced the wall of her narcissism. She wrote almost exclusively about her own internal dramas. At about this time Hillesum began to see a therapist named Julius Spier. Spier was some combination of wise and creepy. He had studied under Carl Jung. But he also specialized in palm reading and believed that it was not enough for a therapist to talk with a patient; since the mind and the body are one, he also insisted on physically wrestling with his patients. Most of them were young women.
The first time they wrestled, Hillesum dumped Spier on his back. “All my inner tensions, the bottled-up forces, broke free,” she wrote, “and there he lay, physically and also mentally, as he told me later, thrown. No one had ever been able to do that to him before.”
Hillesum fell in love with him, and a strange relationship developed, one that was intellectual, sexual, and therapeutic. “You are my beloved…priceless, private psychological university,” she wrote to him. “I have so much to discuss with you again and so much to learn from you.”
For all his flaws and perversities, Spier at least offered her a coherent worldview and an introduction to contemporary psychology. She could accept his views or reject them, but at least there were handholds to grab on to or push off from. Spier urged her to keep a diary and to cultivate her spiritual nature. When he died of cancer in the fall of 1942, Hillesum remembered him as the man “who attended at the