Whipped Cream Difficulties

At Half-Price Books not too long ago, I found Kipling Abroad: Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil, a collection of Kipling’s travel writing.

There’s a rather striking paragraph in one of the essays, “Some Aspects of Travel”. Kipling’s talking about why some men seem to be able to inspire impossible efforts from people everyone else considers to be no-accounts, while other men couldn’t motivate a hand-picked crew of highly skilled individuals to organize a piss-up in a brewery.

A man was asked some time ago why he invariably followed a well-known man into most uncomfortable situations. He replied: ‘All the years I have known So-and-so, I’ve never known him to say whether he was cold or hot, wet or dry, sick or well; but I’ve never known him forget a man who was.’ Here is another reply to a similar question about another leader, who was notoriously a little difficult to get on with. One of his followers wrote: ‘So-and-so is all you say and more; and he grows worse as he grows older; but he will take the blame of any mistake any man of his makes, and he doesn’t care what lie he tells to save him.’ And when I wrote to find out why a man I knew preferred not to go out with another man whom I also knew, I got this illuminating diagnosis: ‘So-and-so is not afraid of anything on earth except the newspapers. So I have a previous engagement.’ In the face of these documents, it looks as though self-sacrifice, loyalty, and a robust view of moral obligations go far to make a leader, the capacity to live alone and inside himself being taken for granted.