On Giving Up

we have to all intents and purposes asked ourselves: what is worth surviving for? Darwin’s answer – somewhere between a riddle and a joke – is that survival is worth surviving for (survival entailing reproduction ad infinitum). Freud’s answer, more commonsensical and just as disturbing, is that pleasure is worth surviving for. Marx’s answer is soci

The ‘magic thing’ is to ‘make boredom and weariness blossom into immeasurable contentment’; the second kind of attention ‘brought a quality of delight completely unknown to the first kind’. Wide Attention re-enchants the world, Narrow Attention can diminish it. Narrow Attention creates a certain kind of person – is a way of overdefining oneself; Wi

When our preferred versions of ourselves are not an inspiration, they are a tyranny (a tyranny with which we can humiliate ourselves).

What kind of self-cure was this strong assertion of ownership for Freud, and what might it have been a self-cure for? After all, he could have been a pioneer not of the ‘I know what I am doing and I know what I’m talking about’ kind of sentence, but of sentences more like ‘I’m not asking you to agree with me, I’m just telling you what I think’, or

what the nudge of language – the choosing and creating of our language – and the sense of having lived have in common is the sense of having to satisfy what is taken to be an essential individual need; partly of making my language and my life my own, whatever that might mean.

‘One needs to recognize the destruction,’ Lear writes, ‘if one is to move beyond it. In the abstract, there is no answer to the question: is the Sun Dance the maintenance of a sacred tradition or is it a nostalgic evasion?’ We should consider, as Lear begins to do, what not giving up would have entailed. The options seem stark: mourning the Sun Dan

It is worth considering the very real advantages, indeed the necessity, of being left out, and having the wherewithal to bear it, and even to make something of it.

‘There is hope but not for us.’ Rather tantalizingly, hope does exist; we just can’t have it ourselves. Logically we can then ask: in what sense does it exist? What relationship can we have with it? We might answer that it is something we want that eludes us: it exists only in our wanting it, which may or may not be good grounds for giving up on it

So giving up, in its myriad forms, we need to remember, whatever else it is, is a gift-giving (and it is always up and never down, as though to some higher authority). To give something up is to seek one’s own assumed advantage, one’s apparently preferred pleasure, but in an economy that we mostly can’t comprehend, or, like all economies, predict.