Does it take more courage to launch a bold attack or to maintain a stout defense? Is courage the result of passion or reason? Is moral courage superior to physical courage or vice versa? And has our contemporary life, often shielded from danger and the immediate threat of war, lost some of its grandeur and resonance because courage -- whatever that may be -- is seldom demanded of us? It's impossible to read Miller's book without jumping from these larger philosophical questions to the even more difficult personal ones, questions that explore the limits of our own fortitude. Miller visited the Salon offices recently to talk about his book and the often unsettling conundrums it raises.

You didn't start out planning to write about courage.

No, I planned on writing about cowardice, the little, daily interactions that you walk away from feeling somehow diminished or demoralized because you didn't stand up, or somebody trod on you or dissed you. You know for sure that you've been a coward when you engage in fantasies of revenge. You'll lie awake or spend the next two hours wishing misery on the person.

I started out with this idea and thought, well, of course you've got to know what courage is. Before you can write about the vice, you've got to look at the corresponding virtue. There's the standard philosophical literature and, oh, I'll check out the soldiers' memoirs. Well, it turns out, courage is maybe the only virtue that's more interesting than its corresponding vice. It just generates better stories. It's no accident that at least until the rise of the novel, almost all of the stories we tell have courage as the main theme. So courage just ended up taking over.

Now cowardice doesn't disappear because it's always the thing you've got to overcome. I'm aware of hundreds, thousands of times in my life when I felt like a coward or felt scared, or stayed away from places that I would otherwise have gone to if I were tougher or more courageous, or just cooler. I thought, Are there any times when I felt courageous, is there actually an inner state that would correspond with the feeling of courage or courageous acts? I couldn't think of any. So I thought, Oh, my God! Am I that craven? I ended up an academic, and that might be the proof of the pudding.

But then I thought, Maybe not, maybe I can think of times when people thought I did something that was at least reckless, if not courageous. I'd find out what people who were manifestly courageous thought about, examine their inner states to see if there's some kind of agreement as to what feelings were involved, if they actually knew they were being courageous.

It turns out that, no, there's no agreed-upon inner state. Sometimes people just blank: "It had to be done, somebody yelled 'Medic!' I ran to help the guy." Most of the time, though, they're just confused. There's too much noise. There are no thoughts at all. They're engaged in automatic behaviors. For others, the internal state was simply terror, fear -- the exact same internal state that the coward has. So many of the medal-winning performances, performances that are honored, the person ends up feeling like he faked it. Like he basically hoodwinked everybody else.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"