Context can prod numbers to defy grade-school verities: 2 plus 2 equals 4, and that's that.
Today, as the riots intensify in Baltimore following the death of yet another unarmed black man in police custody, such verities no longer hold.
He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.