It wasn't trying to be wise.
"His only goal is to do the right thing," said David L. Westin, the president of ABC News and a longtime friend who met Mr. Klein in the 1970's at a reunion of clerks for Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. "This is actually a man who is just in it on the merits and who is trying to be wise, the way Justice Powell always sought to be wise".
"We're trying to be wise.
The book arose from a conflict between two feelings, she writes, that "self-respecting writers should not write about things that wise people prefer not to discuss" and then that, on the contrary, self-respecting writers should never try to be too wise.
Tortorella shot back, asking whether the reporter was trying to be a wise guy, though he used a more colorful term.
Instead he delivered a masterclass in evasion, fobbing off his dodgily coiffed interviewer, Miggs Burroughs, with lines like "there's no real logic to it" and "I'm not trying to be a smart aleck or a wise guy".
So instead of trying to be unafraid, the wiser course may be for us to simply try to keep our fears in check, and not allow excessive fear to become "the mind-killer" (Frank Hebert's Dune) that clouds our ability to behave intelligently, the kind of "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror", as Roosevelt put it, that makes us dumb and racist and paranoid and stressed out.
Things aren't quite where they need to be soil-temperature-wise, so we are trying to be as patient as we can," said Cory Ritter, who farms 2,000 acres in central Illinois.
While trying to "be the change you want to see in the world" is something we might all be wise to try, we cannot sit back and watch industrial civilisation drive the great web of life – ourselves included – over the cliff edge.
