‘I am groping for clarity and coming up with something else, as if the object I wished to grasp, to hold up, rotate, study, understand is not after all susceptible of direct observation. The big things never are. You deduce them, see them askance, by inference.

‘But let us anyway postulate that object and give it a name, and let us call it The Failed Life.’

– Anatomy of Norbiton

Several years ago I set out to inspect and describe a form of existence which I had come to recognise as The Failed Life – a life that has nothing to do with either success or failure, except insofar as their sudden irrelevance gives it time and space to emerge. I arranged the various heads of my project alphabetically, from aetiological to zoological, and set to work. I am up to L. (more...)