On Giving Up

Giving up is always sacrificing something in the service of something deemed to be better.

In her remarkable and orientating book A Life of One’s Own – a book really about how we might sustain our aliveness: the aliveness, the being enlivened, that is the true antidote to giving up – the artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner describes her attempt to ‘decide what [her] aim in life was’:

It is the assumption of the censorship that we prefer safety to danger, closedness to openness, the familiar to the strange. So Freud says, think of the censor as your most important conversational partner rather than the tyrant you are always managing. Where there was sovereignty, there can be mutual exchange; where there is tyranny an experiment

Though to / hold on in any case means taking less and less / for granted Amy Clampitt, ‘A Hermit Thrush’

The Mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. William James, The Principles of Psychology

The idea that life has an aim, or that happiness is what we want, may be simply a way of narrowing one’s mind, of oversimplifying oneself.

Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not;

Freud's work starts from the position that, for better and for worse with no way, by definition, of knowing the consequences; with no way of knowing beforehand what matters need to be curious about our curiosity. We have, as he showed us through psychoanalysis, our curiosity and our morality to be going on from, and our curiosity about them (our cu

‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ This is one of Kafka’s Zürau Aphorisms, written during the war – between 1917 and 1918 – just after he received a diagnosis of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. ‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must