Let Essayistic Fiction Help You

You are going to fail, repeatedly, for the rest of your life. You know this. You’re going to burn food or undercook it, you’re going to get a speeding ticket or arrive too late for things, you’re going to assume a less than worthy political perspective on at least some topic.

Before going further, I should establish what I mean by “failure.” I mean 1) an inaccurate translation from experience of the world into your thoughts, or 2) an inaccurate translation from your thoughts into worldly action.

In short, by “failure” I mean imprecise representation, whether that representation exists in your mind or is transferred from your mind into the world.

I have examples.

Example #1: You take a swing at a baseball and miss. Your mind and body have read the ball’s location differently, or your body acted on your perceptions incorrectly. Either way, that which is physically in the world—the baseball—was not received or acted upon in the way you meant. You didn’t accurately translate what was perceived, or you didn’t accurately represent your thoughts and intentions into action. You have failed.

Example #2: You notice an increasing and dismaying degree of income inequality in your civilization. To address that inequality, you post something on social media that nobody reads, or that only people who agree with you read (and they soon forget what you’ve posted), or that only people who constitutionally disagree with you read (and they, too, soon forget what you’ve posted). Your thoughts represent a worldly situation with accuracy, but then the translation from your thoughts back into worldly action has failed. You have failed—again!

Example #3: Your civilization is marked by systemic and rampant income inequality that is sure to grind people down and destabilize the planet, but you do not recognize that inequality’s systemic nature, nor do you recognize that inequality much at all, and thus you never address this problem. In this case, you have failed to represent mentally whatever’s happening in the world.

Example #4: A slice of pizza looks delicious. You eat it and it burns the roof of your mouth and, also, it tastes terrible. Here you have failed in at least two ways. You have failed to represent, within your mind, the full extent of the pizza’s scorching, awful reality, and you have failed to represent via action your wish to consume pizza happily, because you have inadequately pursued consumption of that pizza.

So different kinds of failure are all failures of representation. Either the world is represented inadequately in your mind, or your mind is inadequately represented through your actions.

These two failures are the source of much embarrassment, moral decay, political debacles, and sadness. And they’re...