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.
I finally caught my animal—a real beast and not a dream.
I ordered coffee and stepped into the sitting room.
It was after nine.
The morning papers had been put at my door. There was mail.