Itinerantdaughter's Blog

So I was looking at a list of review books available for me to critique when I came to a book by documentary filmmaker Polly Morland called The Society of Timid Souls: Or, How To Be Brave.  The synopsis is as follows:

With The Society of Timid Souls, or How To Be Brave, documentary filmmaker Polly Morland sets out to investigate bravery, a quality that she has always felt she lacked.  The book takes inspiration from a vividly eccentric, and radical, self-help group for stage-frightened performers in 1940s Manhattan, which coincided with the terrifying height of World War II and was called The Society of Timid Souls.  Seventy years later, as anxiety about everything from terrorism to economic meltdown continues, Morland argues that courage has become a virtue in crisis.  We are, she says, all Timid Souls now.

Despite a career in which she has filmed in rebel-held Colombian jungles and at the edge of Balkan mass graves, interviewing convicted murderers, drug-traffickers, and terrorists, Morland herself has never felt brave.  Often, the very reverse.  So she sets out to discover how and why courage is achieved in an age of anxiety and whether it might even be learned.  Drawing on her interviews and encounters with soldiers and civilians, bullfighters and big-wave surfers, dissidents fighting for freedom and cancer patients fighting for their lives, Morland examines bravery across the spectrum: from the first childhood act of defiance by Bernard Lafayette, a leader of the civil rights movement who later faced down the KKK in Alabama, or the reflexive will-to-survive of  Vjollca Berisha, a Kosovo Albanian who endured a massacre by playing dead among the bodies of her own family, to the small acts of everyday bravery that quietly punctuate our lives, in schoolyards, labor wards, and hospices the world over.

Along the way, Morland draws attention to some of the myths of bravery that have been conjured and perpetuated over time and argues that, often, courage exists as much in the telling as in the doing.  At once an exploration of what bravery means and a chronicle of the author’s personal journey among those who embody it, The Society of Timid Souls is a profound, approachable meditation on this most valued and mysterious of human qualities.  In setting off on the trail of the lionhearted, Polly Morland finds out a great deal about what makes some of us extraordinary, and what of the extraordinary we all share.

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So naturally the most interesting thing about this to me was the title, and the original Society of Timid Souls mentioned in the first paragraph.  (The book itself sounds kind of self-help-y, and also like a collection of the stories and aphorisms you’d hope to pick out yourself from the news/books you read/world around you, ergo not worth the time to stop living your life to think about how… to live your life.)  Unfortunately, now, if you Google “Society of Timid Souls,” you ONLY get the book, and not the original society.  Any members still with us?

I’ve long whined about my desire to write an article on the remaining Branch Davidians, but it looks like NPR beat me to the punch pretty recently.  Dare I say I think my work would have been better than the skeletal piece on NPR?  Some day, I will get the first scoop!

Clive Doyle, a 72-year-old Australian-Texan, still lives in Waco and still has Bible study every Saturday with another survivor, Sheila Martin. Doyle has become the Davidians’ unofficial historian and spokesman. He says they are still waiting on the resurrection of Koresh.

“We survivors of 1993 are looking for David and all those that died either in the shootout or in the fire,” Doyle says. “We believe that God will resurrect this special group.”

Today, all nine Davidian survivors who were convicted for various offenses related to the initial ATF raid have been released from federal prison. Paul Fatta, who spent nearly 13 years in prison on weapons charges, was released two years early for good behavior. Now 55 years old, he lives in San Diego where he manages his family’s Hawaiian restaurant. Fatta, too, still believes.

“I would like to see some divine intervention, for God to vindicate his people,” he says, “all those that have suffered over the years for truth, who’ve been misunderstood, have been mocked, ridiculed [and] thrown in prison.”