One kind of explanation

I meant not to write publicly, not until I felt that I had made enough of a start at writing again, so I didn't sound like a parody of myself - doesn't it feel like one is always starting again? without having gone anywhere, and yet starting again - but an essay by Susan Sontag reminded me of this passage from Iris Murdoch.

The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking. The difficulty is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair.

What I hadn't remembered was how the passage continued:

The refusal to attend may even induce a fictitious sense of freedom: I may as well toss a coin. Of course virtue is good habit and dutiful action. But the background condition of such habit and such action, in human beings, is a just mode of vision and a good quality of consciousness. It is a task to come to see the world as it is. A philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality. We act rightly ‘when the time comes’ not out of strength of will but out of the quality of our usual attachments and with the kind of energy and discernment which we have available.

It's not even a question of fear, or of desire, or at least not foremost a question of fear or desire. But - which way does courage lie? An exercise of justice and realism and really looking.