The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals - Brett McKay [96]
JOE LESNIEWSKI
Being a hero? I don’t even care for the word. I’m an individual that had a job to do. I don’t feel that I’m any kind of hero. I’m just an ordinary guy like I’m supposed to be. To me, the work had to be done. I was asked to do it. So I did. When I lecture kids I tell them the same thing: don’t brag that you’re anything more than you are.
ED TIPPER
When I was a teenager I took freedom for granted until I got through the army and saw what the Nazis had done in Germany. Then I realized that freedom isn’t automatic; it has a price.
World War II was a justified and necessary war. Last year I met five survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp. The things that happened to those people should never have happened to any human being.
Do I think my actions in the war were heroic? No, I don’t. I’m even uncomfortable with the word. I was part of a generation of young men who did what had to be done.
Glory
FROM HÁVAMÁL
Translated by W.H. Auden and P.B. Taylor
Over 1,000 years old, the Hávamál (literally “Sayings of the High One”) is a collection of Old Norse poems. Its words of wisdom provided spiritual sustenance to the mighty Vikings, who believed the poems to be the advice of Odin, chief of the Norse gods, on how mortals should live.
Cattle die, kindred die,
Every man is mortal:
But the good name never dies
Of one who has done well.
Cattle die, kindred die,
Every man is mortal:
But I know one thing that never dies,
The glory of the great dead.
“Honor is the reward of virtue.” —Cicero
The Soul of Honor
HONOR: AN ADDRESS TO THE CADETS OF NORWICH UNIVERSITY,
AT NORTHFIELD, VERMONT ON THE COMMENCEMENT DAY, JULY 13, 1871
By Malcolm Douglass
I do not use the word Honor here in its very common sense of high reputation, or power; for men are sometimes honored by their fellow men, for their riches, or success, or station, or influence, who know very little of what true honor is. I do not mean that honor which one lad may obtain amongst his fellows by his superior strength, or his talents, his memory, his wit, his symmetry, or his agility. He may obtain a kind of honor for these things, and yet be a mean-spirited fellow after all. These accomplishments and gifts I have no fault to find with; they are good and most desirable in themselves; they are not to be despised if they are not obtained by unworthy means, and employed upon unworthy objects They may justly procure approbation for their possessor; they may often worthily attract the admiration of others; they may excite remark and criticism; they may call forth sentiments of esteem and respect from the generous, and of envy from the base. Nevertheless, the honorable notice which they bring does not necessarily secure their possessor from a great lack of true nobility of spirit. We sometimes find both gifts and a noble spirit in the same person, but the presence of the one does not guaranty the presence of the other.
This Honor, then, the honor of circumstance, of position, of power, is not that of which I would now speak. There is another species of honor, within reach of all—a higher grade; the honor of self-respect; the inner spirit and soul of honor; the honor of thinking good and noble thoughts; the honor of acting upon just, wise, and healthy principles; the honor of living amongst your fellows with kind and just and true and reverent regards and sympathies. The honor which frees you from meanness, vulgarity, baseness, and ignoble conceits and plans. This is the honor which I would now and always commend to you. It is not always popular. I do not care, or wish you to care, whether it is popular or not. I would present it for its own sake, and in its own simple and severe majesty. … this honor of which I speak, and which I commend, may be sought for and gained by every one of you. This spirit of honor, this self-respect, which aims to secure, not so much the approbation of others—though it will secure it in a measure—as the respect and approbation of your