What is violence? When a colleague posed this question, peace scholar Michael Nagler found himself answering: "A failure of imagination." In this timeless excerpt from his American Book Award-winning classic, Nagler reframes our understanding of nonviolence—not as the absence of something, but as a profound positive force that ancient Sanskrit struggled to name directly. Drawing on Gandhi's pivotal night of transformation at a South African train station, he shows how anger itself can become fuel for creative change rather than destruction. Perhaps most striking is Gandhi's observation that history only records the interruptions to love's quiet working—while millions of conflicts dissolve daily, unnoticed, through this unnamed force. The question isn't what we refrain from doing; it's what we choose to become.
