Sublime

It is as if our cultural obsession with goal-setting and optimism has blindly swum into waters far too deep and dark. ‘Believe in yourself; you can beat this thing’: the message is no different from any manual about achieving your ambitions. The same mistake is made in both cases: that upon which this book aims to throw some light. Our goals and as

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to.

an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego.

In their sense of ‘I’. And what is that self? What form does it take? One way of thinking of it, as offered by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, is as a looping pattern of abstractions. Our personality may be the most real thing in the world to each of us, but it is a fiction, a configuration, a way of thinking. It isn’t found in the meat

maudlin

Our ego, our sense of self, always has both these qualities—protective, and imprisoning.

We simply cannot trust that sides of our deep selves will have counterparts in those we meet, and so remain silent and shy, struggling to believe that the imposing, competent strangers we encounter can have any of the vulnerabilities, perversions and idiocies we’re so intimately familiar with inside our own characters. Ideally, the task of culture

Quite a strange man, thought James, watching him go – but what a relief to discover he still contained the capacity to be taken by surprise.

In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insis