Courage

Euripides said, 'A coward turns away but a brave man's choice is danger.' What the ancient Greeks learned, as the first truly intellectual and philosophical people, is that there is more danger to one's hopes, one's mettle, one's pride, in venturing into the battle of ideas, than in murdering a man who disagrees with you - and that doing so therefore takes proportionally more courage. Most people tend to think of courage as a warrior virtue, as belonging typically to battle; and therefore, by analogy, to endeavour on the upper slopes of Everest, in the deeps of the sea, and even on the sports field - in other words, wherever endurance, grit and determination in the face of physical challenges are required. That is true enough. But courage is often demonstrated, beacause it is often needed, in greater quantities in daily life; and there are even times when 'merely to live', as Seneca put it in a letter to Lucilius, 'is itself an act of courage'. Ordinary life evokes more extraordinary courage than combat or adventure because both the chances and inevitabilities of life - grief, illness, disappointment, pain, struggle, poverty, loss, terror, heartache: all of them common features of the human condition, and all of them experienced by hundreds of thousands of people every day - demand kinds of endurance and bravery that make clambering up Everest seem an easier alternative. Whereas mountaineering and deep-sea diving are self-contained activities that last a certain length of time with - if all goes well - return to a status quo ante when they are over, facing (say) grief or disappointment is quite different. They are open-ended, new, different dispensations with unforseeables deeply embedded in them, promising only that much will have to be borne before relief comes. To lie sleepless with pain at night, or to wake every morning and feel the return of grief, yet to get up and carry on as best one can, is courage itself. Moreover, courage can only be felt by those who are afraid. If a man is truly fearless as he leaps over the enemy parapet or hurls himself into a rugby tackle, he is not courageous. Because most people fail to recognise this simple fact, the true quantum of heroism in the world goes unrecognised and therefore unrewarded. The quaking public speaker, the trembling amateur actor, the nervous hospital patient submitting himself to needles and scalpels, are all manifesting courage. 'This is courage in a man,' Euripides further said, 'to bear what heaven sends.' Actually he said 'to bear unflinchingly,' but by this addition he spoils the sentiment, because if courage requires fear, then flinching is perfectly in order. Although ordinary life demands courage, sometimes in exceptional amounts, there is yet another kind of courage required for the task of being human: the courage to meet the new and to accept the different in the chances of experience. Rilke gave luminous expression to this idea in his Letters to a Young Poet, by saying that we need 'courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter'. He meant the courage to accept love when it offers, to face death when it comes, to bear the burdens that life imposes in return for its gifts; and above all the courage to create something to mark our own individual responses to the world, however modest, for even when the courage to do this is unostentatious and private, it can make a crucial difference to the content or the quality of our lives. - A. C. Grayling