trying to lead. Thomas Merton wrote that the desert fathers considered society to be a shipwreck from which all individuals must swim for their lives. The very pecking orders and ladders of success I naturally find myself climbing they fled in horror. In solitude I see that career successes and failures, which look so huge in my day-to-day life, take on a much smaller look from an eternal perspective. (“If you can meet with triumph and disaster,” Kipling wrote, “treat those two impostors both