1.
“When we came to the camp, Hamzat led the khan into the tent. And I stayed with the horses. I was at the foot of the hill when shooting began in Hamzat’s tent. I ran to the tent. Umma Khan lay face down in a pool of blood, and Abununtsal was fighting with the murids. Half his face had been cut off and hung down. He held it with one hand and held a dagger in the other, with which he cut down everyone who came near him. In front of me he cut down Hamzat’s brother and turned against another man, but here the murids started shooting at him and he fell.”
Hadji Murat stopped, his tanned face turned reddish brown, and his eyes became bloodshot.
“Fear came over me, and I ran away.”
“Really?” said Loris-Melikov. “I thought you were never afraid of anything.”
“Never afterwards. Since then I always remembered that shame, and when I remembered it, I was no longer afraid of anything.”
–Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky)
2.
I remember when I was about six, first grade. There was the standard fat kid everybody made fun of. I remember in this schoolyard he was standing outside the school classroom and a bunch of kids outside were taunting him. One of them brought over his older brother from third grade, a big kid, and we thought he was going to beat him up. I remember going up to stand next to him feeling somebody ought to help him, and I did for a while, then I got scared and ran away. I was very much ashamed of it. I felt, I’ll never do that again. That’s a feeling that’s stuck with me: You should stick with the underdog. The shame remained. I should have stayed with him.
–Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews with David Barsamian
