I laughed at his discomfort. It was inconvenient, no doubt, but one couldn’t help laughing. He talked of his fear like a child, openly and directly, without any self-consciousness. Fear is ugly when we see it in another.
I wouldn’t have it like that! I’d said, pretty insincerely, trying to encourage him, “A man dies only once.” But now I really thought that way. It wasn’t courage but shame at being humiliated. Fear was the worst traitor, Osman had said. But it seemed to me that fear was the greatest shame in this world and man’s greatest humiliation, raised above him like a whip, pointed at his throat like a knife. Man is surrounded by fear as by flame, drowned in it, as in water. He fears fate, the morrow, the law, a stronger man; and he isn’t what he wants to be but what he has to be. He fawns before fate, prays to the morrow, blindly follows the law, smiles humbly at the man in power whom he hates, reconciled to being a monstrous creation made up of fear and obedience.If man was sometimes sad, it was because he recalled himself as he was in his dreams, as he could have been, were he not as he was. And if the world were not what it is.
I wouldn’t have it like that!
I said, I am not afraid of you, fate! Nor you, tomorrow! Nor you, powerful man! But this I said to myself, and I said it with fear, half free, split down the middle. One part isolating itself because it couldn’t accept, the other silent because I didn’t want to suffer.