You just want that cord to break so bad, don't you?

Yes, and they congratulate themselves for their courage. But I feel contempt for them. I feel that that's a lie.

We rank those kinds of behaviors. Some we allot more virtue than others. Do you feel the same contempt for the person who actually climbs up Mount Everest? Do you give them a little more credit? Yeah, you do, don't you?

Yes, I do, because it seems like more of a risk to me.

I think it's all symbolic. I think we give all kinds of credit to people who go up, and not to the people who come down. It's just too easy. Gravity does it all for you.

If you were to come to me before I read this book and ask me to think of an example of courage, in fact, soldiering wouldn't even be the first thing to come to my mind. The first thing I would think of would be standing up to the Nazis. That, to me, has become, in contemporary life, our ideal of courage.

I have this part in the book about Lorenzo, the Italian mason who helps Primo Levi when Levi is in the concentration camp. He takes risks to give Primo extra food every day through the fence, and I ask: Is Lorenzo courageous or is he just good? Maybe the courage just comes along for the ride. It seems a natural manifestation of his goodness that he's helping this other man. I've struggled to deal with what this is in relation to courage.

Take the case of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his buddies. The person who dies on a grenade like that does it absolutely as a reflex. Nobody expects anybody to have to do it. It's not cowardly not to fall on the grenade.

There's no shame in not doing it. So there isn't a negative motivation.

So it can't be fear of shame that would motivate you to fall on a grenade. So what is it? Well, it's that "greater love hath no man," I guess. It's just a sacrifice for these people you've lived with or these people you're in the presence of. It occurs almost instantaneously, and maybe love's the way to talk about that rather than courage. Maybe love's the virtue that Lorenzo has. Of course love doesn't mean much if it isn't going to take certain risks on behalf of the beloved.

That may be one reason I don't think the bungee jumper or the Everest climber is really all that brave. I mean, I guess they are, but they don't have a good reason for what they do.

You're very Aristotelian in this. You want courage to be in pursuit of noble goals. I would say the bungee jumper, the Everest climber is just practicing.

It's just for its own sake. To me it feels degraded, in a way, because they're exercising nerve simply for the sake of exercising it.

This is another problem. The mountain climber, I think, has to be respected in a certain way. How are you going to ever have any sense of confidence that a person will help someone in need under a Nazi menace if that person has never done anything to get themselves ready for that kind of thing?

In fact, I do believe that you can't ever know who the courageous will be. I'm with your guy who says that when the moment of truth comes, when someone has to be brave or make a sacrifice, or simply act in a way that changes things, they just do it. And it's fundamentally mysterious why or how.

You know, the studies on those people who helped Jews say that the single most important thing that generated the helpful response was simply being asked. In other words, they were too embarrassed to say no. I mean, "Take me in, take me in, they're going to kill me!" And what are you going to do, say no? But if you had to actually motivate yourself to do the positive thing, you were much less likely to do it. It is the inability to turn someone down in that kind of emergency.

You could say that's shame, or you could say that's embarrassment, or you could say that being asked reminded them of their own humanity and then they couldn't not respond to that.

About practicing for virtue. Tim O'Brien -- he writes very beautifully on these issues -- describes a time in fourth grade, when some little girl who was dying and had her head shaved was in his class. She wore a scarf, and he adored this girl. Some bully kid, probably just a dumb little boy, decides to tease her about the scarf and pulls it off. And she bursts into tears because she's bald. O'Brien just stood there and watched. He wanted to intervene and protect her but he didn't do it. And he now, of course years later, is still mortified that he didn't do it. And he says, "Maybe standing up in fourth grade would have done me some good later on for Vietnam, when a little practice at being courageous would have helped me quite a bit."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"