Aristotle, Courage and the Golden Mean

I saw this quote and it rang so true that I wanted to write about it.

Courage is the golden mean as a virtue, between too much fear which produces cowardice and too little fear which produces recklessness.

When I Googled it to see where this sentence came from, I found that I had already written about it two years ago, on Medium.

This experience brought to mind a friend who had read every Louis L'Amour Western. That would be 100, for those who might be counting. (He also wrote 250 short stories, so the guy was prolific.) What she said was that in his last books he sometimes mixed up his characters. That is, someone in book 87 might accidentally make a cameo appearance in book 98. She was certain that L'Amour's little mix-ups were unintentional. 

I have occasionally found articles or blog posts I wrote that I forgot about entirely. Occasionlly I have opened a file that I thought was really well written, but wasn't sure if I wrote it or it was copied from somewhere else. 

I'm not yet 70, so I have miles to go before I sleep, and will likely experience this more than a few times as the shadows creep in a little further down the road.

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Here's the original story on Medium. It's titled Courage: The Golden Mean Between Cowardice and Recklessness.

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The reason this Aristotle quote was on my mind was because I was thinking about our National Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who wrote a poem titled Aristotle. It happens to be one of my favorites and appears near the end of his book titled Sailing Alone Around the Room. It's a fabulous bit of writing that many writers would sacrifice an arm to be able to achieve. (You can still be a writer with one hand, right?) It might actually be enlightening to discover what it really feels like to experience the sound of one hand clapping. (Am I pushing that too far?) 

Collins was on my mind because very recently an acquaintance of mine, a poetry prof at UWS, got a phone call from Mr. Collins. The National Poet Laureate had called to notify him that his book of poems, Roze & Blud, was under consideration for a Pulitzer.  Congrats, Jayson. Your fans are all on pins and needles.

Related Links

 

Aristotle, by Billy Collins

UWS Poetry Prof's Collection Gets Pulitzer Consideration

Jayson Iwen Talks About Literature, Translation Work and Jawdat Fakhreddine's Lighthouse for the Drowning

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins