205makes me feel like singing?” And then know the answer:
“Singing.” What most gets you in the mood to dance?
Dancing. The next time you ask someone to dance, and
they say, “I don’t feel like dancing,” you might reply,
“That’s because you’re not dancing.”
100. Walk with love and death
“I am a coward.”
That was how the book began. It was a novel I was
reading not long after I had graduated from high school,
and those first words staggered me. I remember star-
ing at those words, unable to continue reading, I was so
stunned. Never has a book connected with me so quickly.
For I was a coward, too. It’s just that I never admit-
ted it so openly as did the author of A Walk with Love
and Death.
The author was Hans Konigsberger, and the book
was a medieval love story later made into a movie by
John Huston, but none of that mattered. What mattered
was that there was another coward on the planet other
than me. Even if he was fictional, the words were real
enough for me.
My self-image at the time I read that book was based
on my fears and nothing else. In my mind, I was truly a
coward. And if someone were to tell me I’d done some-
thing brave, I’d think they were wrong somehow. Or
that they didn’t know how easy that thing was.
Where did this self-image come from? I don’t blame
my parents, because I believe we create our own pic-
tures of ourselves, and I had a choice whether to stick
with this self-image or not. (After all, I could have done
what Gordon Liddy did when he was a boy—upset that
he was afraid of rats, he caught some, cooked them, and
Walk with love and death