Understand in about 5 minutes
In seven short essays William George Jordan argues that calmness, self-reliance, and the daily habit of doing one's best are the inner sources of strength, influence, and happiness.
Idea map
Mental models
The calm person is pictured as a navigator whose course is marked on his chart and whose hand is ever on the helm, prepared for storm, fog, and hidden reefs rather than drifting like a rudderless ship.
It offers an image for meeting crises with steadiness: keep a clear aim, do the day's best, and accept that you cannot control when or how you reach your harbor.
Life is described as a state of constant radiation and absorption: to exist is to radiate qualities like hope or cynicism, and to receive the radiations of others, as invisible natural forces are known only by their effects.
It makes inner character feel consequential by treating one's mere presence as an influence others continually absorb.
Jordan treats apparent failure as often the dawning of a greater success, holding up lost rafts, the alchemists, and Columbus as cases where a fruitless aim produced an unexpected and larger discovery.
It encourages the reader to take up broken effort again, looking in the debris of failure for the foundation of a new purpose.
Summary
The Majesty of Calmness gathers seven short essays on what Jordan calls individual problems and possibilities. Each essay takes a single quality of inner life and argues that real strength is grown within the person rather than supplied by circumstance, wealth, or speed.
The opening essay defines calmness as the crown of self-control: the poise of a nature in harmony with its ideals, ready to be focused in an instant to meet any crisis. Jordan contrasts the calm person, whose hand is ever on the helm, with the fatalist who drifts like a rudderless ship. Calmness, he says, comes ever from within, like the unruffled deep beneath a storm-tossed surface.
From there the essays turn outward to the costs of modern life. Hurry is named the scourge of America, a counterfeit of haste that substitutes restless energy for a clear plan and sacrifices home and health on its altar. Against this, Jordan sets the power of personal influence, the silent and unconscious radiation of character, and the dignity of self-reliance, which treats life as an individual problem that no proxy can solve.
The middle essays reframe difficulty and effort. Failure, Jordan argues, can be a success in disguise: the lost raft that maps ocean currents, the alchemists whose dead ends birth chemistry, Columbus whose mistake discovers a continent. Doing one's best at all times becomes a life-plan, a way of meeting unanswerable questions with faith and steady conduct rather than despair.
The closing essay turns to happiness, which Jordan calls the greatest paradox in Nature: it grows in any soil, defies environment, and consists in being rather than having. He distinguishes it from its weaker imitators, gratification, satisfaction, and content, and locates the royal road to happiness in consecration, concentration, conquest, and conscience. The book ends on its central reversal: unhappiness is the hunger to get, and happiness the hunger to give, found by those who seek to radiate it rather than absorb it.
Key concepts
Selected Quotes
Calmness comes ever from within.
Hurry is a counterfeit of haste.
Unhappiness is the hunger to get; Happiness is the hunger to give.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of The Majesty of Calmness; individual problems and posibilities by William George Jordan.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6911/6911-h/6911-h.htm
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
Project Gutenberg released this ebook in 2004; the essays were first published around 1900.