Loss, at Long Last

"Tyrannical fantasies of our own perfectibility still lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become another excuse for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals - complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love - are lives experienced as continuous failure" (Phillips). If perfectionism is ultimately humiliating and the best source for (self)punishment, then: no more ideals! Suffer because one must, suffer without the hope of getting it right. The question is how to sustain any sense of optimism in this condition. The answer is easier to write than to practice while writing, so to speak. Darwin: "I have as much difficulty as ever expressing myself clearly and concisely, and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time." But this loss of time is also necessary to get a better sentence, a more thorough reasoning. No one better to see this than Phillips: "The obstacle proves to be an instrument, the loss a calling." What is required is to accept the necessity of this loss. It's reveling in loss, being optimistic about loss as instrumental, that is most difficult, especially when the loss lasts so long.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night.