'Not At All Abashed Before the Fact'

“We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcass, has most time to consider others.” 

What a remarkable sentence, one I would never have the guts to write. It’s not the sentiment but the form that’s so intimidating – three independent clauses stitched together with semicolons. Each is a stand-alone, a lexical island. They read like Emerson (though he likely wouldn't use carcass), who composed entire essays out of sentences with no necessary logical connections among them – more mosaic than bas relief.

 

The author is Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer I’m happy to have rediscovered in recent years. The essay is "Aes Triplex" (1878; collected in Virginibus Puerisque, 1881). The title is a Horatian tag from Ode 1.3 meaning “[heart enclosed by] triple brass.” It might be read as a morale-boosting pep talk. Tuberculosis would kill Stevenson in 1894 at age forty-four. In his first paragraph he writes of death: “[S]ometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel [that is, its victims, the dead] during a score of years.”

 

As a writer Stevenson was almost pathologically productive, as was another writer he goes on to praise as an exemplar of steadfastness in the face of illness and other challenges, including death – Dr. Johnson:

 

“No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognize our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact.”

 

I remember years ago when the poet Marius Kociejowski told me his favorite writers were Johnson and Stevenson. Especially welcome is the reminder that Johnson’s lifelong fear of death “little affected his conduct.” We carry ourselves with “courage and intelligence,” dignity and thoughtfulness for others, despite our fears.