When Alice Koller removed herself to Nantucket for three winter months in the early 1960s, she had no idea what it would take to learn to live deliberately and freely. Up until that winter, Koller arranged her life around the men she desired, abandoning good job opportunities in distant cities for menial work in whatever city her lover du jour lived. No matter that those men often had other sweethearts, or that they left happily to take jobs elsewhere. No matter, either, that there was never an occasion on which this plan or schema for prioritizing worked in her favor.
At the edge of Nantucket island, Koller began to notice her patterns of thought and behavior as patterns she herself had created, instead of as unavoidable catastrophes that simply happened to her out of nowhere. As she began to see herself as responsible for those patterns, she began, in Murdochian terms, to let go of fantasy and to see reality. The word "see" is important, not only because of the emphasis Murdoch places on vision: Koller has to see reality before she can see the reality of it, before she can accept and prefer reality to fantasy. —I am not saying this clearly. All of Koller's interpretive frames, all her criteria for evaluating events, persons, and situations, all her mental furniture were built of fantasy and ego. When the real first appears on the scene, she has no reason to believe it is any different than any other frame, criterion, etc. she had used or created. The first step is not to see the realness of reality, but is instead to notice it at all, simply to see it there at all, even if what it is cannot (yet) be grasped.
Thus, when Koller realizes she has been moving through her days on the island as though at any moment she could call up or write to or come across one of the men she adored and desired, she forces herself to say to herself out loud "They are not possibilities," "They are not available to me," "I don't know which of two men I want to marry when neither of them has ever asked me nor likely ever will." She does not quite know why it is she makes herself say these things out loud, and she does not get any immediate benefit from it. But what she says is true and real and these things are among her first steps toward living a life grounded in what is real instead of a life built around escape into fantasy.
It is extremely tempting to think that virtue can be won simply by abstaining from what is easy or pleasant. If only I had not gone on that shopping binge, for example, I would have been thrifty and frugal and thus virtuous. But that's only part of the story. For virtue, I must face what is painful. If all I do is abstain from doing that which I don't need to do or ought not to do (like shopping when I do not truly need things), I will not achieve real excellence. Courage is facing what is painful: I am vain; I must graduate; I would rather abdicate responsibility for my life than do difficult things.
But I can take on courage gracefully—wear it like a perfume, daub myself with foreign virtues until, having worn them so long, they become forever associated with me.
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