6/7/07

You allow yourself to get too easily distracted: even trivial things occupy too much of your time, not least because you use them to postpone the most important. Not having regular, adult responsibilities exposes you to yourself: to your faults and weaknesses, which are allowed to grow and run riot. Couldn't, though, the propensity to postpone what is important, to concern yourself with the trivial and the unnecessary, be regarded as the dominant truth of your adult life? And how then does this relate to the peculiarly persistent, or rather recurring, ambition you are dealing with (or indeed subject to) now? Is it important, or merely another distraction? If a distraction, why have you put it off for so long? If important, why do you hope for nothing from it, why do you expect - now at least, but even, in a different sense, before - the whole enterprise to turn to ashes in your hands (by which you don't necessarily mean 'fail')? Why this overwhelming need to leave the realisation of your plans inviolate (it need hardly be pointed out that this is not the only thing you need to leave inviolate)? 'Lenin's great achievement was not to have feared success' - you need not agree with the specific contents of this statement (though you should certainly by now have formulated some consistent position on it - another postponement) in order to agree with its general truth. Why should fear of success and fear of failure be so closely interlinked? Here again, when L. asked you this question you could offer no adequate answer. Clearly, though, the strong suspicion that you fear success (an inheritance from your father) and your confusions and doubts over ambition (that is, which kind of success exactly) must surely be connected. Your hope was always - your vague, underlying hope, that is - that commitment would show the way out of this dilemma, and that conscious engagement with what was vital and real, and above all, necessary, would overcome all this neurotic procrastination, which was really nothing more than the consequence of conceiving human self-realisation as the accumulation of cultural capital for the purposes of professional advancement and social display. Who wouldn't, in these circumstances, become indifferent among this multitude of choices and possibilities, each offering a slightly different version of the same. Couldn't one perhaps see this neurosis not as the consequence of bourgeois self-indulgence, but as a kind of confused rejection of the poverty, the paucity, of contemporary 'affluent society' life? Then the struggle might become, no longer shameful and contemplative, but heroic.