I listened and nodded as one of the other trainers said something about struggles needing leaders and about it being the job of those leaders (Of you, here in this room, he said) to be courageous and to lead their coworkers through their fear. If I had tried to answer then, I think I would have said that people who fight and people who don’t aren’t very different from each other, or that the difference has less to do with anger or fear and more to do with vision—that some people can’t imagine or haven’t yet imagined what good a fight will do, can’t see a version of the world that doesn’t yet exist.

Now, having thought and thought about this question since you asked it in 2004, I wonder if the will to fight is unrelated to vision or imagination, if instead it’s a kind of metamorphosis, a state of being so ravenous for change that you are changed. The tightening skin tightens around the neck and body of the caterpillar, which is already walking around with parts of another, future body tucked inside. The you before the fight denatures you, exploding into newness out of necessity. (“He must shed that tight dry skin, or die,” writes Nabokov of a caterpillar in its final stage.)