The Subject Is Courage

Cold midwinter is the time to call on your sisu!

A good friend commented recently that citizens of the United States are now becoming “accustomed” to living with daily fear and uncertainty, adding, “Black people have lived this way for centuries.” The same can be said for Native Americans (and indigenous peoples in all parts of the world invaded by Europeans), certain (but not all) immigrant groups, gay people, etc. To survive and thrive under constant threat requires courage, and now is no time now for anyone to be fragile.

Former enslaved people who fled the South in the Great Migration knew fear both in the homes they fled and on the road north, and danger did not stop when travels ended. Whether the ultimate destination was the northern States or Canada, equality of opportunity was not granted upon arrival. Nevertheless, those migrants saw improvements in their lives. Perhaps most importantly, they gained hope. Courage they had all along.

Isabel Wilkerson‘s book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration tells this story beautifully and is a good book to read, if you haven’t already, during Black History Month.

I am only about halfway through Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life (and less than halfway through Jimmy Carter’s presidential memoir, Keeping Faith), because at bedtime and in the middle of the night I turn usually to fiction. The King biography, however, is quite readable, and when I sit down with it in the late afternoon or early evening, the pages turn quickly. It is not, let me make clear, a hagiography. The author presents MLK’s flaws and self-doubts along with his courage and other virtues. (People often say of some admired person that he or she “was not a saint,” forgetting that those elevated to sainthood by the Catholic Church were all human beings, and none was perfect.) His personal courage inspired others.

 

King’s fervor lit a flame in many of those who heard him. Jesse Jackson, who was fifteen years old at the time of the 1957 Lincoln Memorial speech and would go on to become a minister, activist, and presidential candidate, said King’s emergence offered concrete hope that racism could be fought and beaten. Before King, there seemed to be two options: “You could go into a deep dark hole,” Jackson said, or “you could adjust—adjust to be the best pool player, adjust to be the best singer, the best barber.” Now King offered a realistic third option, Jackson said: “You could resist.”

 

A younger friend once asked me, “What were the Sixties really like?” I told her that depended on who you were, how old you were, where you lived, and what was going on your life. The Sixties were not the same for everyone, and neither were the Fifties.

 

Many historians would describe the 1950s as a time of tranquility, a time of prosperity, a time when the gap between the Left and Right narrowed and Americans, for the most part, agreed that they were fortunate to live in the greatest and most powerful nation on earth. But such descriptions overlooked many who did not feel so fortunate. Once those who were overlooked began to express their discontent, once they began to yearn for more, the picture-perfect image of America in the 1950s showed cracks. Where would the fight for real freedom spread next? It would spread almost everywhere, including Mongtomery.

 

When Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a sermon or spoke at a rally, people were inspired by his fervor. No demagogue, King was also persuasive in his reasoning and offered a hopeful vision of the future. 

 

Fear is contagious. It resides in the most primitive part of the human brain, always ready to be activated by threat, real or perceived. Survival of the prehistoric group depended on the contagion of fear. 

 

But fear can be overcome, and courage, like fear, can also be contagious. 

 

Courage was contagious in Mongtomery, Alabama, in 1963. It was contagious during World War II in the French village of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, where villagers took a united stand. I’m sure everyone reading my words today can come up with examples from personal experience, as well as from history. Real leaders are courageous and inspire others to be brave. 

 

“Courage is like a muscle,” in the words of John McCain. “The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets.” Before he died, McCain worried that America’s cultural courage muscle was growing weak from lack of exercise, and that, he warned,

 

…means trouble for us all, because courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, compassion, and humility. In short, leaders who lack courage aren’t leaders.

 

--Here I want to shift gears, so hold on! Let’s take a look at standup comedy! What? Yes! 

 

Historically, jesters in a royal court, besides telling jokes and performing acrobatic tricks, were permitted to speak their minds freely, even going so far as to criticize the monarch. At times they were trusted advisors to kings and emperors, while at other times speaking truth to power meant they risked their lives. Their courage provided both a safety valve and a warning. 

 

And so it is fitting that in a country whose government is supposedly “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” comedians all over our land provide criticism of nominal leaders (I really do intend that adjective), along with more general entertainment, and my favorite these days is Josh Johnson. This young man is both brave and funny! He makes me laugh! 

 

Laughter—how subversive! We are never thoroughly beaten down if we can still laugh. (Do you think Winston in Orwell’s novel 1984 ever laughed?) When someone tells important truth in a way that provokes spontaneous laughter, our courage can get a big boost.

 

Where do examples of courage in our world today, in the United States, give you inspiration and hope and make you feel a little braver yourself? I take heart from the examples of U.S. House of Representatives minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, California governor Gavin Newsom, and others. Even Senator Mitch McConnell—and I am no fan of his political views in general; quite the contrary—managed to locate his cojones and speak out against January 6 and vote against the abominable Hegseth nomination. The City of Brotherly Love has stood out en masse. Who stands out for you?

 

As for those of us who are not in Congress, not governors or mayors or ministers with large congregations, we can still spread the contagion of courage among ourselves and to others. Yesterday morning an old song came into my head, something my sisters and I learned as a hymn in Sunday school when we were little girls. Take a listen, and tell me if this doesn’t strengthen your resolve to do whatever you can, day by day.

 

Another Sunday school song: "Open up your heart and let the sun shine in!"

Did the author write this book just for me?

September field, Leelanau County

Ah, September! It can really break your heart, can’t it? And so can books, even – maybe especially – the ones we love most. 

 

In my high school French classes, every year the teacher (different teacher, different years) urged us to read The Little Prince. It was like English teachers urging us to read (actually, this latter book was assigned reading, and I still skipped it) The Red Badge of Courage, but I was the quiet rebel in the back of the room, resisting what seemed like such common coin. If everyone read it, I didn’t want to. I wanted to discover my own books, thank you very much! Eventually, years later, I finally picked up The Little Prince and couldn’t believe I’d denied myself such an exquisite gift for so long. 

 

Sometimes I called my late husband, the Artist, “the little prince.” He was an only child, after all, adored and indulged by his doting mother, who was quite thoroughly “wrapped around his little finger,” as the old, trite saying goes. The youngest in his generation of cousins, many of whom were already teenagers when he was born, he was doted upon by those girls, too. Their real, live little doll! He learned quickly that charm was a winning formula, as in the church pageant when he had failed to learn his Bible verse and stood on stage grinning and twirling his new tie and saying to the congregation (instead of the assigned Bible verse), “See what I got for Christmas?” They loved it! So I would tell him that he was “the little prince” or, alternatively, “Fate’s little darling.” Not that the life of my Artist or any artist is ever be financially easy, but he knew what really mattered, and he drew love to him, always. His gift for friendship and for conversations on important topics (see again The Little Prince) made him unforgettable.

 

Last winter in our mountain cabin, I handed David an English translation of the St.-Exupéry classic, and he had time to read enough of the first few pages, before another hospital trip intervened, so he could understand why I thought he was that little prince, as well as a little prince – and why I had felt like that little prince myself reading it and why he and I were so drawn to each other and so happy together. The pilot gave up his dream of becoming a painter, but the Artist never did, despite countless material sacrifices necessary to gain the dream's reality. But a drive from Kalamazoo to Galesburg for thrift shopping and coffee with him was, I told one of his friends years ago, more wonderful, I'm sure, than some people's trips to Paris: Our conversations could be adventures in themselves.

Conversations – about things that mattered! And that laughter! I have stars that laugh!

Whenever I said "asters," he would say, "Lady Astor's horse."

When Lynne Rae Perkins’s book about squirrels having adventures was published, the Artist was amused to hear me recommending it to adults until one day he happened into the bookstore while I was reading aloud from Nuts to You! “Is that the squirrel story you were talking about?” he asked. Of course he got it! Can you think for a moment that he wouldn't have?

 

No wonder, then, that I would think of him while reading Violet & Jobie in the Wild. (Actually, it’s no wonder that I think of him whatever I do, is it?) What I didn’t expect were all the accumulating passages and similarities in Violet’s story and mine the further I got into the story. I'll share just three with you.

 

When Zolian recounts to Violet his flight in the owl’s talons, immediately I thought of the Artist’s flight by helicopter from Willcox, Arizona, to a larger hospital in the Phoenix area. He said of that flight, still thrilled the next day, “It was transcendent!” and when I think of it now, I think, He had that -- and loved it!

 

Zolian wanted to see once again the morning flight of sandhill cranes. The Artist and I went many times to Whitewater Draw in Cochise County, Arizona, or, closer to our winter ghost town cabin, to Twin Lakes outside Willcox to see sandhill cranes in flight. You hear them long before you see them, and they circle for ages, it seems, high in the sky, only gradually coming to water and earth. The cranes were always transporting to hear and see.

Then on one page came the words (I could scarcely believe it) “Easy peasy”! 

Our little Peasy

There was more, but….

 

Disclaimer: This is not a book review. In case you have not already figured it out, I cannot be objective about a book that touches me so very deeply and seems so personally directed at the deepest moments of my own life. But that has always been the wonder of the best children’s books! 

Doesn’t every girl who ever read Little Women feel that she is Jo March? Doesn’t every boy or girl reading The Black Stallion inhabit the character of Alec, befriending that magnificent horse on the island? Children a hundred years ago, hearing the story of “Hansel & Gretel,” must have imagined themselves surviving in the woods and narrowly escaping a hideous fate and then, thanks to the story and their own imaginations, taken courage for whatever was frightening in their own lives. 

That’s it, you see. We escape into stories, and the best don’t take us away from life but deeper into it. “Real life,” says Zolian in Violet & Jobie. “What other kind is there?” 

 

I hope all readers, of whatever age, who read Violet & Jobie in the Wild feel that the story was written just for them. Lynne Rae Perkins has made magic here once again for us all. Even tears can be good....

"The world: it really is such a beautiful place."

 

P.S. Please do not overlook the other new September book gifts from Leelanau County authors. More about these sometime in the future, I promise. 

P.P.S. And Sunny Juliet -- just because --

Open Wide! Just a Couple Spoonsful!

(Nothing to do with text below)

Last year I read Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), a book I picked up because our reading circle had not read any works of German literature and I wondered if this one might fill the bill. In the end, although I was glad to have read it, I felt the heavy weight of philosophy and relative paucity of plot would not be welcome to the group as a whole. We may take the Thomas Mann route, but if anyone has other suggestions, send them my way.

More recently there came into my hands (due to a friend’s downsizing her library for a move to smaller living quarters) a volume of Hesse’s entitled Reflections, an expanded version, first published in Germany in 1971, of a smaller book of brief passages the author had had privately printed from his novels, letters and other writings. “Aphorisms are something like jewels;” he notes in the book’s epigraph, “rarity increases their value, and they are enjoyable only in small doses.” He is probably right about the small doses -- I seldom read more than two or three pages at a time from Reflections -- but it is rewarding to dip at random into this box of jewels and pull out a treasure to admire and pass along. One of the first I wanted to share with friends was this:

If here and now, in the face of today’s difficulties and requirements, we behave with a certain amount of human decency, it is possible that the future, too, will be human.

Many friends approved and liked this quotation, but my friend Helen pointed out, quite rightly, that everything hangs on the big “If.” Hesse wrote the lines in 1922, she observed, and could hardly have imagined what would come to pass in Germany (he had moved to Switzerland) in the next two decades – a nightmare that was anything but decent. Helen and I have no quarrel over the facts. What I must hope, however, is that in our ‘today,’ knowing what grew out of that earlier European ‘today’ when decency was abandoned, we will remember that nightmare and not accept behavior that would bring on a repetition of history’s modern European Dark Ages. The danger, I agree, is very real.

The Hesse book remains by my side. After having written a response to something I’d seen and been troubled by on Facebook, I found last night a couple of quotations appropriate to the subject of heroism and courage. The first is short and to the point:

As I see it, the love of heroism is permissible only in those who risk their own lives; in others it is not only a delusion but also, I believe, a ruthlessness, which fills me with shame and anger.

Ruthless encouragement to others to risk their lives while we remain safely at home, handing out judgments: that aspect of a modern “warrior culture” should give us reason to pause and reflect.

The following passage in the book enlarges on the theme of courage by examining its opposite:

Anyone who shirks the labors, sacrifices, and dangers that his people must undergo is a coward. But no less a coward and traitor is the man who betrays the principles of thought to material interests, who, for example, is willing to let the holders of power decide how much is two times two. To sacrifice intellectual integrity, love of truth, the laws and methods of thought to any other interest, even that of the fatherland, is treason. When in the battle of interests and slogans the truth, like the individual, is in danger of being devalued, disfigured, and trampled under foot, our one duty is to resist and save the truth – or rather, the striving for truth – for that is our highest article of faith.

Do these statements seem controversial?

·     “[A] coward and traitor is the man who betrays the principles of thought...”

·     “To sacrifice intellectual integrity ... is treason.”

·     “...[O]ur one duty is to ... save the truth.”

Do you think Hesse exaggerates?

These are heavy thoughts, but I hope the small doses, if it did not win for them a warm welcome, at least allowed them a fair hearing. Anyone interested can read more about the life of Hermann Hesse here. For other books of quotations, less scolding and more can-do in nature, look here.

And if you look to movies for inspiration, look no further than “Broken Trail,” a surprising Western starring Robert Duvall that brings together historical detail, believable dialogue, and stunning cinematography. The story has a Western’s requisite heroes and villains but manages to feel real and gritty and dangerous without plunging into a cesspool of four-letter words. And the horses! The horses are magnificent!

The beauty of horses, the companionship of dogs! What would the world be without them? Bleak indeed!