On Giving Up

We are asking what we are going to have to lose to gain what we think we want.

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?

‘Life, he logically opined, was what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess.’ The implication here being that life might get away from him, that it can somehow escape us; that even though we are to all intents and purposes alive, we have to arrange to annex and possess life as though it is something we must colonize, or claim, or appropriate.

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.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, but as it turns out you may have to travel hopelessly and never arrive. You will certainly never arrive at exactly what you had anticipated.

what Freud and psychoanalysts after him have been very good at showing us is how and why we are so prone to get our pictures of wanting so wrong, and so disturbing. Or if not wrong, at least unduly frustrating. Or, in James’s language, simply mistaken. Wanting may always be to varying extents frustrating, but so may the ways we have of talking abou

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.

Theories of human nature, after all, can only be stories about what people are deemed to need and want.

the study of literature, we might say, is always broaching this conflict between the aliveness and deathliness, or deadliness, of language.