“The Boys in the Boat” is a stunning read about the University of Washington rowers who won the 1936 Olympic gold in a sanitized Berlin as the Nazi horrors were beginning.

Life is long if you know how to use it.

— Seneca

Lately I’ve been immersed in two expertly written and extremely compelling books that have prompted me to think about the concept of “cultivating a rich inner life.” More about these two books in a moment; but, for now, what does that mean? What’s an inner life exactly?

There are a range of ideas online that includes words like humility, courage, gratitude, forgiveness, love, vulnerability, empathy, purpose, self-knowledge, humor, flexibility and forbearance. Advice for how to “overcome fear,” “harness fulfillment,” and “connect with the source of your power” abounds from experts on everything from spirituality to diet to politics.

Every human I suppose has an inner life. But isn’t the irony/dilemma that if one doesn’t have a rich inner life one wouldn’t know or miss it? I guess we’re partially talking about the differentiation between inner/outer; that is, how we present ourselves in public or how we look to others versus how or who we are inside our own heads.

Life of the mind

For my purposes, I’m going to define cultivating an inner life as having a life of the mind — that is possessing a contemplative ability to absorb and enjoy ideas, to take pleasure in using one’s mind to consider, play with (even fondle) ideas and use them to inform and enrich one’s outer life. Winter is a good season to enrich the mind.

The two non-fiction books I mentioned are, first, “The Boys in the Boat,” by Daniel James Brown, about the University of Washington men’s eights rowing team that won the gold in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin; and “Heart and Mind,” by Axel Madsen, about the lives of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

These books fell into my lap in that amazing way that life can sometimes unfold in an eerie synchronicity with no conscious planning: one book was passed on to me informally by a friend, and the other caught my eye in sorting through boxes in my garage.

I say “eerie” because these books converse with one another and provide overlapping though differing perspectives on an intense and dramatic period in history — the years between 1930-50, when the rise of Hitler in fascist Germany, the death camps and extermination of the Jews (gays, Roma gypsies or anyone else not considered “Aryan”), and the forging of a new world order tumbled out of this horrific cauldron and, in many ways, set the context for this new century. (Even more presciently, we have just passed the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation.)

George Pocock

For several years I had a houseboat under the University Bridge in Seattle just adjacent to the George Pocock Rowing Center, the shell storage warehouse and training site for the University of Washington. I was always curious about the odd name, but I never did more exploration than simply watching the teams load and unload their shells and hit Portage Bay with coach and megaphone close behind. “The Boys in the Boat” illuminates in brilliant detail the extreme sport of rowing: its required commitment to pain (the races are excruciating); the delicate balance of individual skill with loyalty and coordinated team effort; the strategy needed to win; and, more than anything else, strength of character. Pocock, a Brit, came to the U.S. to design and hand-build rowing shells made of (at that time) cedar, and his attention to detail and his intimate understanding of rowing is a critical part of the story.

The Udub team of ’36 went to the Berlin Olympics just in time for the monumental mockery and propaganda perpetrated by Hitler, Joseph Goebbles and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl meant to sucker the world into thinking Germany was an upstanding and non-threatening nation, one willing to play by the accepted global rules of engagement.

What no one knew at the time was that prior to the arrival of the international community of athletes, coaches, and reporters to Germany’s world stage, Roma were rounded up in the streets and packed off to camps, “No Jews Allowed” signs were dismantled, and Berlin citizens were instructed in how to treat their visitors. The ruse worked beautifully. Avery Brundage, an official with the International Olympic Committee, said at the time, “No nation since ancient Greece has captured the true Olympic spirit as has Germany.” Of course, the truth won out eventually.

Bob Moch of Montesano

Because we now know the full story — the indescribable horror of the gas chambers, death marches, torture, starvation, and unspeakable inhumanity — reading about our boys provides a succulent irony. Brown reminds us that it was many of these same burly American boys who would return to defeat Hitler’s twisted toadies and liberate Europe.

But our boys won glory only by the skin of their teeth. When German officials saw that America was the boat to beat, they placed them in the far left lane, most handicapped by weather and currents. In fact, they were so far away from the starter that they didn’t hear the signal to begin and were dead-last out of the gate.

The coxswain in the boat, who delivers the strategy and stroke pace to the rowers, was our very own Bob Moch, born in Montesano June 20, 1914. (A great summary of Moch’s life and the race here: https://tinyurl.com/w38kw3c). Moch’s stroke oar, Don Hume, the rower who sits facing the coxswain and transmits the beat to the others, had been sick for days with a high fever and was unresponsive for most of the race. They were badly lagging every other boat. It wasn’t until Moch began pounding the side of the shell that our guys picked up the pace — to an amazing 45 strokes per minute — and surged to the front in just the last 10 strokes. They beat the Italians by six tenths of a second; the Germans came in third.

Mind in the boat

The contrast of the bloody shadow of the Holocaust with the glorious win of our rough and tumble Washington team — they were mostly country boys from hard scrabble circumstances and families with logging or farming roots — set up a pleasurable duet in my mind. One of the rowing chants that Moch created to bring his rowers to “swing” (a sort of mystical rowing togetherness) was “MIB” — mind in the boat. I think it’s a great metaphor for catalyzing a rich inner life.

These fellows used their bodies to enhance an inner life. Or was it the other way around — a triumph of discipline and purpose? They found a way to humility, vulnerability, humor, and, yes, even love — they continued to gather every decade to row together and celebrate with family and friends until the last surviving member, bow rower Roger Morris, died in 2009 (https://tinyurl.com/ssdec4b).

What are you passionate about? Put your mind there, completely. Use these dark days to enrich your inner life so that when the sun returns you can shine.

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Next week, an extension of this conversation with a Nahcotta neighbor, and an exploration of the devotion in the lives of de Beauvoir and Sartre during these same war years.