Sublime

Adam Phillips

So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.

We see a future of satisfaction in a present of deprivation.

he is left feeling that his agency, or rather his desire, is confused or compromised, or even stolen from him;

he is a writer shrewd enough to know that betrayal only matters because something else matters more.

In the simple pleasure-pain calculus, one is poised between the unsatisfying object from which one must be freed and the preferred, potentially satisfying object that one seeks.

That if it is our first nature to need, it is our second nature to obscure our frustration;