“I see what happens to Dick almost as the opposite of a collapse: a standing firm, an assertion rather than a weakening of will. This is why Dick’s failure is accompanied by the affirming sense that he is not falling short of but living up to his destiny, fulfilling it. E.M. Cioran got as close as anyone to the mysterious heart of ‘Tender’ when he said of the Fitzgeralds’ time in Europe—“seven years of waste and tragedy,” as Fitzgerald himself termed it—that in this time “they indulged every extravagance, as though haunted by a secret desire to exhaust themselves.” Elsewhere, without even referring to Fitzgerald, Cioran writes that “the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest…will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.”
(lifted without permission from ‘Otherwise Known As The Human Condition’, Graywolf Press, 2011)
