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;

The wish, the drive to familiarize, Shklovsky suggests, is insistent, the insistent as second nature. And the implication is that this drive to familiarize is like a drive towards death, towards the death-in-life that contemporary reality was felt by some people to be (we take note, needless to say, that this essay by a Russian critic was written

What would it be, Freud asks through the disordered medium of psychoanalysis, to believe in curiosity as opposed to believing in science, or religion, or politics, or in psychoanalysis, or even in nothing?

a person is forever haunted by what he is excluding.

A sense of an ending, of course, may not involve a sense of completion. Things can often end before they are finished: there are ruptures and abandonments and failures of nerve, loose ends that continue to trouble us.

In a now familiar binary, it seems as though the only alternative to wanting (and its discontents) is not wanting (and its discontents). It is like believing that our choice is between greed and anorexia. When in fact we can wonder, in any given situation, what we might want and not want and what else we might do in situations in which wanting or

When Freud writes that protection against stimuli is more important for the individual than receptivity to stimuli, he is making us think about precisely this.

When one is left out, something else becomes available, even if what first becomes available are the difficult and dismaying feelings of being left out (as though feeling left out may sometimes be like stage fright). So the always ambivalent need to be left out, and the wish to be left out, has to be included in our repertoire. Exclusion may

the developmental transition from wanting as certain and knowable to wanting as provisional and experimental. Both kinds of wanting are necessary in different situations, and as means to different ends.