_Andante_
1
Reveille was the heat of burning gasoline, gears grating, rubber
clattering on the sticky pavement and bits of shouts, floating around
like confetti. I can remember when it used to be hoofbeats, quiet
neighbor-talk, and sometimes, utter silence.
I lay glistening in a depression of the bed. At first, the big noise
of the city, diminishing when the lights changed, and plunging up with
new zeal a moment afterward, gave me only the pleasant sensation, the
titillations and satisfactions, of being in New York. Then I remembered
my circumstance. The frightened little animal that I am tore terribly
around while I tried to catch it and to hold it and to remind it that
the thin tissue on the front of its brain was capable of managing its
panic. I spent some time at the job and sat up trickling.
All my life I have listened to a wearisome cell repeat an old saw: the
coward dies a thousand times, the brave man once.
A person is afraid to be cowardly.
For many years, owing to this rather superficial sentence, I had to
accept the inner humiliation of cowardice. A boy with my kind of
imagination, my style of projecting, could not but help finding in his
head the taste of the thousand deaths.
And I am often cowardly still. In those few morning minutes, I chased
my coward a long distance.
But I do think the aphorism should be discarded. Certainly the coward
dies a thousand times. So, too, however, does the man of imagination.
It is the manner of the thousand deaths that is important. And
bravery--our poor, human bravery--is not necessarily consonant with
faulty imagination or none at all, as this dumbbell's apothegm implies.