Freud shows us how the hide-and-seek of modern lives works; and that hide-and-seek may be an enlivening way of describing our lives. And that hide-and-seek may make us curious about other ways of describing our lives; and curious about why hide-and-seek has become such a compelling picture.

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

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’:

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

‘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

The Crow had lived in a land they understood to be given them by God; when it was taken away there was nothing they could do but give up on their lives. Just as people tend not to be mad but to be driven mad, people tend not to give up but to be forced into giving up.

we can use language and it can use us, and the point and not the problem is the contradiction.

and are things only a language-using animal would be preoccupied with. We assume that animals and plants are just living and not wondering what they are doing. We may wonder when and for whom the question

in. Life as elsewhere, something we have to get to, or find, or seek out.