But while his fear of the dark may have been baseless, the bravery it drew out of him stayed with him for the rest of his life. “Courage,” he writes now, “which is no more than the management of fear, must be practiced. For this, children need a widespread, easily obtained, cheap, renewable source of something scary but not actually dangerous.” Darkness, he says, fits that bill.2 As much as I love the story, it is hard to imagine it happening today. Most parents I know would give their darkness-challenged child another chore or offer to go with him.
