I noted recently my appreciation for Elizabeth Moon’s novel Against the Odds, citing her character Kevil Mahoney’s discussion of the distribution of human talent. Another favorite passage of mine is a bit of impromptu marriage counseling given by an older man, Professor Gustaf Aidersson, to one of her young protagonists, Lieutenant Barin Serrano. (By way of background, Aidersson has been married for decades to a sculptor named Kata, while Serrano is recently married to one of Moon’s longer-running protagonists, Esmay Suiza, now Lieutenant Commander Esmay Suiza-Serrano.)
“A man who is just a scientist, or just a soldier, or just a woodcutter isn’t a whole man. I’ll tell you what I think a man is—and by man I don’t mean a featherless biped or something who just happens to have human DNA and a Y chromosome. A man is a person who has learned—is learning, is willing to learn—to know himself. Who can face the truth about himself and go on living, who makes the right kind of difference in the world.”
“Truth’s not always easy,” Barin muttered into his potatoes.
“Truth is never easy,” the professor said. “Truth about yourself is the hardest. But men love, men protect those they love, men walk with honor. So can women—Kata would smack me with one of her carving tools if she thought I didn’t know that—but right now, because we’re both men, we’re talking about men.”
“What if you . . . make bad mistakes?” Barin asked.
“You fix them, as best you can,” the professor said. “Admit them, make amends, try again. I’ve certainly made them. Lots. It’s how you learn.”
I love Moon’s emphasis here: being a real man—or a real woman—is about facing yourself honestly, asking yourself the hard questions, accepting the truth without defense, and moving forward with honor.