What It Means to Be a Man Now

What It Means to Be a Man Now

War, Love, Exile, and the Quiet Reconstruction of Masculinity 

Author’s Note

I began thinking about this essay after hearing the journalist Alex Wagner ask a simple and serious question: What does it mean to be a man today?

She has two sons, and the question carried more than curiosity. It carried the concern of a mother looking at the public world her boys are entering, a world crowded with bad examples of political and spiritual leadership, men who mistake grievance for strength, cruelty for courage, and power for character.

I have been deeply disturbed by the hatred spiraling around the question of power. Racism. Misogyny. The cultivation of fear. The anger embodied by men such as Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the whole grim company surrounding them. Their version of manhood depends upon enemies. It requires humiliation, dominance, suspicion, and the constant manufacture of threat. It is loud because it is hollow.

This essay is my attempt to answer Alex Wagner’s question through the life of Sam Douglas, the central figure in Madness of Beauty’s Light. Sam is not an example of perfection. He is a soldier, sailor, lover, father, wanderer, exile, and finally a writer. He is brave and frightened, tender and selfish, disciplined and wild. He is the man I have used to examine the life I have lived and the man I have tried to become.

Through him, I have come to believe that manhood is not machismo, heroism, cruelty, dominance, or even stoicism. It is the unbreakable, though often tested, kernel of self. It is calm confidence, centeredness, honesty, responsibility, and the refusal to make others carry the weight of one’s fear.

I offer these thoughts not as commandments, and certainly not as a final answer, but as one man’s reckoning. I hope they may offer some guidance and perhaps some hope to boys becoming men, to men still becoming themselves, and to the mothers and fathers wondering what kind of men the world is teaching their sons to be.

I have spent much of my life among the traditional proofs of manhood. War. Physical danger. Command. Sex. Work. Money made and lost. Oceans crossed. Women loved badly and well. Men buried. Countries entered under false names or with no name at all. I have been praised for courage when I was frightened and accused of weakness when I was merely tired. None of it, taken alone, made me a man.

That is one of the quiet conclusions beneath Madness of Beauty’s Light. The book is filled with the raw materials from which men have traditionally constructed their legends. There is war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. There are secret operations, prison yards, weapons, aircraft, blood, broken bodies, and decisions made in the fraction of a second permitted before death. Later there are women, boats, tropical islands, storms, Hollywood, money, failure, exile, and the strange loneliness of becoming old in a foreign village. A younger man might look at such a life and see proof. The older Sam Douglas looks back and sees evidence.

Evidence is not the same as proof.

War did not make Sam a man. It divided him. Out of fear, discipline, appetite, violence, and the need to survive came the Man and the Beast, the two voices that accompany him through the book. The Man plans, watches, navigates, restrains. The Beast smells danger, desires, attacks, survives. Neither is false. Neither can be dismissed. They are not tidy symbols of good and evil. They are the broken cooperation of a human being who has learned that civilization and savagery may live in the same body and sometimes depend upon each other.

The young soldier cannot afford a philosophical understanding of himself. He must move. He must stay alive. He must act before he has time to consider what the action means. The moral examination comes later, sometimes decades later, in a quiet room in the South of France when the guns are gone, the women have gone, the boats lie elsewhere, and the old man discovers that survival was only the beginning of interpretation.

We often say that war turns boys into men. It is one of those sentences’ nations repeat because nations require boys to go to war. War may turn a boy into a soldier. It may teach him vigilance, loyalty, improvisation, endurance, and the intimate geography of fear. It may also make him cruel, numb, suspicious, addicted to danger, or incapable of understanding why ordinary life feels so pale afterward. War is an experience of enormous power, but power does not confer wisdom. It merely leaves deeper marks.

The scar proves that the body was wounded. It does not tell us what the man learned.

In Madness of Beauty’s Light, the young Sam is thrown into circumstances in which the old virtues appear useful. Courage matters. Endurance matters. Silence matters. A wounded man may need to master his terror long enough to drag himself out of danger. A leader may need to speak calmly while everyone around him is close to panic. Stoicism has its hour. It becomes destructive only when a man mistakes an emergency discipline for a complete philosophy of life.

A man may need to become a locked room to survive the night. He cannot live there forever.

Sam does try to live there. The Beast remains useful long after the jungle is gone. The senses stay sharpened. Desire remains entangled with danger. Violence does not disappear merely because the war ends. It enters other rooms wearing ordinary clothes. It follows him into love, domestic life, work, the sea, and the long series of attempted reinventions that make up the middle passages of the book.

This is where the old definition of manhood begins to fail. A man can be brave under fire and cowardly before tenderness. He can survive an aircraft crash and be unable to remain still inside a peaceful house. He can lead men through danger yet fail to understand the woman lying beside him. He can cross a hostile country and still be unable to cross the small distance between his own silence and another person’s need.

These are not contradictions added to diminish him. They are the truth of him.

The young Sam believes movement is a kind of answer. He moves through war, through women, through occupations, through cities, through identities. He goes to sea. He becomes a sailor, and the sea offers him another ancient masculine form. The captain. The navigator. The solitary man before weather. The one who reads the wind, judges distance, carries responsibility for the vessel and everyone aboard her.

There is genuine manhood in this. A ship will not respond to boasting. The sea has no interest in reputation. A man may call himself brave, but when the wind rises and the rigging begins to scream, confidence must become competence. The sailor learns that command is not volume. It is attention. It is knowing where the vessel is, what she can withstand, what the crew requires, and when pride must be surrendered to weather.

Yet the sea, like war, does not automatically ennoble. It may enlarge a man or give him a magnificent place to hide.

In the sailing chapters of Madness of Beauty’s Light, freedom and exile are often the same wind blowing from opposite directions. Sam escapes the land, the failures of domesticity, the obligations that seem to close around him. He finds the bohemian sailors, the floating republic of people who have stepped outside conventional life. The vessel My Love becomes possibility, escape, vocation, and myth. Dirk appears almost as a figure of fate, providing the boat, the capital, and the permission for Sam to become the man he imagines himself to be.

But a boat cannot absolve its captain.

A man can cross an ocean and carry every unfinished argument with him. He can sail toward paradise and discover that paradise has already fallen because the fracture is not in the geography. It is within him. The tropical light in the book is never merely beautiful. It interrogates. It illuminates the muses in bikinis, the sea, the body, the green shore, and also the emptiness waiting behind them. Beauty and madness grow beside each other because beauty cannot save the man who refuses to see what he has brought into its presence.

The old myths of manhood tell us that a man discovers himself through conquest. He conquers fear, territory, the sea, other men, and often women. Madness of Beauty’s Light gradually turns this mythology inside out. The great difficulty is not conquest. It is recognition.

Sam’s relationships with women are central to that recognition. They are not decorative love stories placed between the scenes of war and sailing. They become another field upon which he encounters his divided self. Ann, Susan, Adela, Paulette, Alice, Laura, and the others do not simply love him or leave him. Each reveals a different region of his hunger, fear, vanity, tenderness, and inability to remain.

He loves, but love does not cure him. Sometimes he turns love into shelter. Sometimes into escape. Sometimes into desire so intense that intensity itself is mistaken for truth. He is capable of tenderness and selfishness in the same embrace. This is not unusual. It is merely more honest than the romantic version in which love transforms the wounded man because a woman is willing to suffer beside him.

No woman is obliged to redeem a man from the life he has lived.

Adela comes closest to understanding the artist hidden beneath the soldier, wanderer, and sailor. She tells him that he must write because writing is his dream. In the middle of manic love, collapse, and the storm passage from Martinique toward Bermuda, she recognizes what Sam has not yet fully recognized. The life is not completed by surviving it. It must be turned into language.

Writing becomes the later form of navigation.

The sailor takes a position from stars, horizon, depth, wind, and time. The writer takes a position from memory. Both instruments are imperfect. Memory moves. The horizon deceives. The current carries us farther than we know. The navigator who lies to himself is dangerous because the sea will eventually reveal the error. The writer who lies to himself may complete an entire life without knowing where he has been.

This is why honesty becomes the essential masculine virtue of the book. Not bluntness. Not confession as performance. Not the theatrical honesty of the man who claims to say whatever he thinks and leaves everyone else to bleed from it. Honesty begins when Sam no longer arranges his memories into a defense.

The old man in France does not sit in judgment over the young soldier. He does not pardon him either. He allows the young man to remain frightening, lustful, wounded, brave, ridiculous, selfish, generous, and lost. The older voice speaks from inside the wound, not from a hill above it. The sentence becomes the place where the young man and old man meet.

This may be the book’s most important contribution to the question of manhood. A man does not become whole by killing the boy he was or silencing the Beast that helped him survive. He becomes whole by recognizing them, giving them names, and refusing to let either rule alone.

There is a dangerous fantasy in modern discussions of masculinity that men must choose between the old brutality and a new harmlessness. This is too simple. A man should not be harmless. Harmlessness may be nothing more than helplessness renamed as virtue. A man should be capable. He may be strong, forceful, sexually alive, competitive, adventurous, and dangerous when danger is required. The question is whether he possesses these powers or they possess him.

The Beast is not evil because he has claws. He becomes evil when he is permitted to choose every destination.

The Man is not virtuous merely because he speaks calmly. Discipline can become calculation. Restraint can become emotional absence. Intelligence can serve cruelty as efficiently as appetite can. The task is not to choose one half but to create an interior order in which instinct, reason, desire, tenderness, memory, and conscience may speak without any single voice becoming king.

That order is what I mean by centeredness.

But centeredness is not simply calm. It is not serenity, stillness, or a life untouched by disorder. It is the unbreakable, though often tested, kernel of self that remains beneath every identity a man has worn, and every judgment placed upon him.

War tests it. Love tests it. Failure, humiliation, exile, illness, betrayal, poverty, and age test it. The world may injure a man, strip him of rank, take away his money, weaken his body, destroy his reputation, and leave him alone in a room with no witness to the life he once lived. Yet something remains that cannot be granted by applause or removed by contempt.

This kernel is not invulnerability. It is tested precisely because it can be wounded.

Nor is it stubbornness. Stubbornness is often fear refusing instruction. The kernel of self is more supple. It can change its mind without dissolving. It can admit error without surrendering dignity. It can bend beneath suffering without becoming whatever suffering demands. It is the place from which a man says: I know what happened to me. I know what I did. I will not lie about either. I remain responsible for the person I become next.

Sam’s life tests this kernel repeatedly. The boy is tested by the brutalities and hungers of childhood. The soldier is tested by war. The lover is tested by desire. The husband and father are tested by domestic failure and absence. The sailor is tested by weather, command, and the seductions of escape. The writer is tested by memory. The exile is tested by silence. The old man is tested by the distance between the life lived and the story told.

Each identity presses against the kernel. None owns it.

Centeredness is the calm confidence of a man who has stopped requiring the world to certify him. He no longer needs every room to know that he has been a soldier, sailor, lover, man of danger, or man who has stood in places where death was close enough to touch.

The centered man does not deny what he has done. He simply stops using it as a uniform.

Machismo is the opposite of this. Machismo must constantly repeat itself. It wears its boots indoors. It speaks too loudly, threatens too quickly, and treats every disagreement as a challenge to rank. It requires weaker people nearby because it cannot feel large without making someone else small. It is not confidence. It is terror of exposure.

Cruelty belongs to the same theater. We have too often mistaken cruelty for authority because cruelty produces immediate obedience. A frightened child grows quiet. A frightened woman becomes cautious. A frightened subordinate obeys. The cruel man sees the silence around him and believes he has created order.

He has created weather.

Everyone near him learns to read his face, his footsteps, the position of his hands, the amount he has had to drink. He becomes the storm around which the household arranges itself. This is not manhood. It is the failure of a man to carry his own fear, so he distributes it among the people who love him.

One of the conclusions I draw from Madness of Beauty’s Light is that a man should leave people less frightened than he found them. This does not mean he must always be gentle. Sam’s life contains moments when force is necessary, when hesitation could kill, when the Beast must be allowed near the surface. But force should answer danger, not insecurity. It should end when the danger ends.

Too many men carry the battlefield home because battle gave them the last clear definition of themselves. There the rules were immediate. Protect, attack, survive. Civilian life is more ambiguous. A wife does not need a commanding officer. A child is not a recruit. Love cannot be secured by perimeter. The habits that saved the soldier may destroy the family unless the man learns a new form of courage.

That courage includes apology.

The younger Sam possesses physical courage in abundance. The older Sam acquires another kind, the courage to look backward without arranging flattering light. He asks what his absences cost, what his desires demanded from others, why danger felt more natural than peace, why the boat was sometimes a calling and sometimes an escape. He recognizes that suffering does not automatically make a man noble. Pain may deepen a person, but it may also make him vain, cruel, or endlessly self-excusing.

“I suffered” is not the end of moral inquiry.

This matters in the twenty-first century because many men feel the old foundations moving beneath them. The authority once granted automatically to fathers, husbands, bosses, soldiers, priests, and powerful men has weakened. Some experience this as theft. They believe manhood itself is under attack because the throne at the head of the table is no longer guaranteed.

But a manhood dependent upon the silence, obedience, or diminishment of others was never centered. It was supported from outside.

The life in Madness of Beauty’s Light moves through many such external identities. Soldier. Intelligence operative. Prisoner. Wanderer. Lover. Husband. Father. Sailor. Captain. Hollywood writer. Exile. Each identity gives Sam a costume and a temporary shape. Some fit better than others. None is sufficient.

The final man is not the sum of his roles. He is the consciousness capable of looking at all of them without disguise.

This is where age enters the essay, not as decline but as another country. The body that once moved through jungle, climbed rigging, fought, desired, and survived begins to slow. The old masculine culture does not prepare men well for this. It values power but has little language for its disappearance. It praises conquest, production, sexual vitality, and physical command. When those diminish, the man may believe he is diminishing with them.

Sam, alone in France, discovers another measure.

The old man does not need to reenact the young man’s danger to prove that it happened. He does not need to be forever desired to know that he was loved. He does not need another voyage to call himself a sailor. The sea has entered his imagination. The women remain in memory. The dead continue to speak. Writing gathers what the body can no longer pursue.

The village quiet is not the opposite of the adventurous life. It is where the adventure is finally understood.

That understanding does not arrive as peace exactly. Madness of Beauty’s Light is not a book of clean redemption. Love and ruin continue to walk together. Beauty still grows beside madness. The Beast does not disappear into a cloud of incense while the Man kneels in wisdom. The old divisions remain, but they are no longer hidden. Sam’s salvation, such as it is, lies not in innocence but in seeing truthfully.

Perhaps that is what being a man now means.

Not to become innocent again. Not to pretend that age has purified desire or that reflection has repaired every wound. Not to claim the title of hero because one survived what killed others. It is to discover the unbreakable kernel of self beneath all the identities a man has worn and all the judgments placed upon him.

A man may be frightened, defeated, brokenhearted, humiliated, or lost and still remain himself. The world may alter his circumstances, damage his body, darken his reputation, and take away nearly everything he believed defined him. Yet the kernel remains. Not untouched, but intact enough to choose.

A man should be able to hold his contradictions without making others pay for them. He should know that confidence does not require domination, tenderness does not dissolve strength, and honesty is not a weapon to be used against people who have already trusted him. He should understand that protection can become control, freedom can become abandonment, adventure can become flight, and silence can become a long cruelty.

These truths are not discovered in a classroom. Sam discovers them imperfectly through the jungle, the prison yard, the beds of women, the decks of boats, the katabatic wind, the false paradises, the broken domestic rooms, and finally the solitude of the writer’s desk. He discovers them because each identity eventually fails him. The soldier cannot explain the lover. The lover cannot silence the Beast. The sailor cannot outrun memory. The exile cannot escape himself.

The writer must invite them all into the room.

I once believed manhood was proved by action. That belief is understandable in a young man. The body wants trials. It wants witnesses. It wants to know what it will do when the aircraft falls, when the gun appears, when the sea rises, when the woman leaves, when the door locks behind it. Such moments matter. They reveal something.

But a life is not made only from its moments of crisis. It is made in the years afterward, in what the man does with what was revealed.

The crisis tests the kernel.

The years that follow show whether he has remained faithful to it.

The heroic act may last thirty seconds. Character must live through the remaining hours.

Manhood in the twenty-first century is not a return to the old hard father, nor is it an apology for masculine existence. It is not machismo, cruelty, domination, or the lifelong burial of feeling under the name of stoicism. It is not an identity awarded by war, money, sex, fatherhood, work, or public success.

It is the possession of an inner ground no one else can give and no one else can take away.

It is the unbreakable, though constantly tested, kernel of self.

That kernel does not make a man cold. It permits him to remain tender without losing his shape. It allows him to love without surrendering judgment, to suffer without worshipping his wounds, to change without becoming unrecognizable to himself. It gives him the calm confidence of a man who does not need to dominate the world because he is no longer at war with his own existence.

This is the deepest form of centeredness. Not serenity. Not certainty. Not hardness. It is the knowledge that whatever weather comes; there remains within him a point from which he can still choose.

A man knows the Beast is aboard. He knows the Man may also lie. He reads the wind, the damage, the depth beneath him, and the distance still to travel. He understands that calm is not the absence of weather. Calm is the confidence that comes from knowing where the keel is beneath the water, what holds the vessel together, and what cannot be surrendered without becoming someone else.

He may still be lost.

He may be damaged.

He may be afraid.

But he has not abandoned the kernel of himself.

And he no longer falsifies his position.