Charlie earned more than two billion dollars across his lifetime. He served as vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway for nearly five decades and had been close friends with Warren Buffett since 1959. Among the small circle qualified to judge such things, he was widely regarded as one of the most original thinkers on capital allocation the American twentieth century produced. And he spent his entire adult life refusing, in a methodical and almost amused way, to let any of it alter his daily existence in ways he could not justify on grounds other than the wealth itself.

Munger's reading was the most consistent feature of his routine. Roughly five hours a day, every day, for decades. History, science, biography, engineering, philosophy. He read with the patience of a man who had concluded early that most useful knowledge arrives gradually and rewards regular attention more than concentrated effort. His children described him as a column of newspapers and books that occasionally lowered itself to join the family conversation. Reading was what he wanted to be doing, and he arranged his life to fit it in.

Then there was the eye. In 1980, after an operation for cataracts, he developed a complication that left him in persistent pain, and the eye was eventually removed. He was fifty-six. He had built a career on close reading, and now he had to do the same work with one eye. He bought a glass eye, managed the consequences, and went on reading at the same pace. By any account that survives, he never complained about the loss in public.

The part of Munger's life that resists easy interpretation is the ease with which he held everything together. The house, the reading, the eye, the indifference to display, the friendship with Buffett, the late-night talk about ideas that interested him and the brisk dismissal of the ones that did not, the fortune he had no intention of spending. From the outside it looked like a coherent philosophy. From his own perspective it was something simpler. He had decided early what he wanted his life to consist of, and he arranged his time around those decisions for seventy years.

People assemble their lives through a series of accommodations to expectations handed down by parents, peers, employers, advertising, and the era they happen to inhabit. The accommodations compound over decades and produce a life that looks successful from the outside and feels slightly off from within. Munger skipped the process. He read what he wanted, lived where he wanted, raised his children with attention, accumulated capital because the work interested him, and made few further adjustments to the original design.

A particular quality of acceptance runs through accounts of his later years. He absorbed the loss of his eye without drama. He absorbed his son Teddy's death from leukaemia in 1955 without ever becoming the kind of man for whom that death defined his identity. He absorbed his own ageing without the strenuous denial common among wealthy men in their final decades. The acceptance was practical. He had concluded that life delivers conditions a man can either resist or work around, and the working-around produces better outcomes.

The framework has aged unusually well. The American century produced many men of comparable means, and almost none built a daily existence they would defend, in detail, against a sceptic. Munger could defend his. The house in Hancock Park was where his books were. Reading was the activity that interested him most. The friendship with Buffett was a sixty-four-year conversation he simply enjoyed. Investing was a vocation he found genuinely interesting and kept practising into his nineties because the work stayed engaging.

What he understood, and what few of his contemporaries managed to say as cleanly, was that wealth works properly only as a substrate for a life a man would have wanted regardless of the wealth. He built the substrate efficiently and used it sparingly. The lives that fortunes usually produce, full of houses and boats and managed staff and the logistics of private travel, were available to him at every point in his last fifty years. He declined them with a courtesy that suggested he had never been able to work out what they would add.

The ninety-nine years are worth pausing on. He had held these views since his thirties, when his fortune was small enough that circumstance could explain the philosophy. By his nineties the philosophy was plainly the result of seventy years of choice, compounding for so long that the resulting life had a coherence almost impossible to assemble after the fact.