HOW are your New Year’s Resolutions coming on? What’s out of your life?
Are you still a prisoner of your desires?
Saying bye-bye is never easy. Sometimes – as with Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp – you just know it’s time to stop.
Here are some things I’ve given up on over the years: U2, saltshakers, Radio 1, fried eggs, BrewDog pubs, Michael McIntyre, the Mod revival, Radio 4, Drambuie, scrambled eggs, Question Time, the NME, Radio 2.
And when it comes to books by Adam Phillips, I’ve always been something of a quitter. Why? Because he intimidates me.
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I gave up counting his previous books on the “by the same author” page. The ones I’ve tried before have similar Montaignesque titles: On Kindness; On Getting Better; On Balance; On Kissing, Tickling And Being Bored, and (ooo-er missus) On Flirtation.
What makes me halt? A former clinician’s suspicion of psychoanalysis, its flimsy scientific basis, a dark voice in my head – the replicant Leon from Blade Runner – barking: “Let me tell you about my mother!”
Man up! Phillips is the most famous psychoanalyst in the country – John Banville says he’s one of the finest prose stylists in the language and compares him to Emerson, John Gray says he’s the best living essayist writing in English. Phew!
In Phillips’s own titles – On Balance, I’m clearly Missing Out. On Wanting to Change, I’ll have another try. I don’t want to give up On Giving Up.
There’s a difference, of course, between giving things up (smoking, booze) and giving up in the most profound of senses ie, suicide. Phillips takes only 16 pages before quoting Albert Camus’s dictum: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem – and that is suicide.”
We’re back with the gloomy doomsters – Gray, Nietzsche’s “will to nothingness”, Kafka, and his belief that there is hope, but not for us. Happy days!
But Phillips wants us to avoid the fate of Sisyphus shouldering that boulder. He proposes we decouple the association of giving up with suicide.
That giving up in the Johnsonian sense (Samuel, not Boris … the latter really should call it a day) of yielding, of abandonment, of resignation, might make our lives more bearable.
Phillips ponders our persistence in the face of failure, that it may be honourable but not necessarily sensible, and even wonders if we should teach “giving up” at school.
He talks, wisely, of the key difference between an “enlightening disillusionment”, as with, say, George Orwell and Arthur Koestler’s renunciation of Stalinism, and a “terminal disillusionment” that leads to suicide.
BUT why should we go on? Phillips quotes Samuel Beckett’s “I’ll go on” from The Unnamable and asks, like Curtis Mayfield, why we keep on keeping on? Why persist?
Phillips gives three reasons. Firstly, Darwin’s purely biological argument that we should survive for survival’s sake, to propagate the species.
Phillips adds numbers two and three: Sigmund Freud’s “live for pleasure”
and Karl Marx’s imperative to live to enable social justice.
Many argue for a fourth – living for love, as per the teachings of Jesus.
Halfway through reading, I see the error of my old ways – I’ve been devouring his books in a rush. An internal clamour for rapid enlightenment. Tell me the answer, Zen master!
He needs to be read slowly – his maxims, axioms, his apophthegms, demand time, a seat, a mull, a muse. As with Blaise Pascal and Don Paterson, Phillips proves that slow, aphoristic thinking – classy pensées – are not written by, ahem, ponces.
And such thinking is necessarily hedged with qualifications, hesitations, occasional fuzziness – he’s not writing a scientific paper after all – and irresolution. He actively disillusions us by insisting we face up to what we don’t know.
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At times, his koans have me scratching my head but that’s because I’m forever a student in the dojo of life. Still, there’s an excitement in following the Ariadne’s thread of his logic with its hairpin bends, its three-point turns … On Giving Up is ideal reading for those contemplating retirement. And as is said: All good things come to an end.
This is the last of my weekly book reviews and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of them. Thanks plus to all who gave me welcome feedback. It’s been a great pleasure writing weekly for the Sunday National.
Be seeing you!
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