Proust calls courage a sort of defense of one’s inner self, which I found inspiring; I understood courage as finding and retaining one’s identity.
I thought Socrates was right: courage was a kind of knowledge about what was truly fearsome and what wasn’t. (Being in the wrong, not being good, was something truly to be afraid of, while pain and death weren’t actually fearsome relatively, not if one had true knowledge.)
But it’s painful to be a regression.
Then I wasn’t sure that was right and thought that if only a little medication were applied to this spot or the other of the brain, I would be serviceably brave, just like a person with a broken leg, provided a staff, could serviceably walk. My fears required sedation, was all. (You required true knowledge of the name of a good doctor.)
Then I thought, maybe in the absence of real courage when it was really needed, our only recourse was aforethought (although maybe Science/medication is a kind of aggregate of forethought — science was Humanity’s Aforethought): of heading off well in advance those situations one doubted one had the courage to face in person. (This was why people exercised.)
Then I thought, there is magic in reality but it is always black magic since we don’t have proper minds. The mind, unless specially trained, makes illusions of the world, which stir us up about everything over nothing and the opposite.
Magical thinking is the failure to see past one’s own biases, narratives, scripts and hopes. There is the cause of, “how could this ever have happened to us?” That is the spell we enchanted persons weave.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 