Victims of the Will to Fail

Rarely, in the days of our youth, do the symptoms of the "will to fail" show themselves in our souls; so we explain our shrinking from setting out into the battle of life as the shyness of the raw beginner, or, if we have never once tried to put forth our utmost effort in our work, we invent for ourselves the excuse that the work we happened upon — when there was no escape from setting out to earn a living — is not the work for which we were altogether suited. And the difficulty grows worse if we marry and become heads of families: it may well be within our power to endure hardship and harm for a few years, but to ask your dependents to be patient as you are patient — that is a matter requiring a courage which many of us may not possess.

Often we resolve at the outset that the intended goal shall never slip from our sight — but our exhausting work claims most of the hours of the day, and no wonder the strength we then require is a strength beyond human capacity: to bear seeing oneself drowned in work while all the rest of the world amuses itself and plays, and when no gleam appears before our eyes promising success if we persevere. And so we drop behind — without being aware of it — from the procession of life, without taking our share in it, without our talents unfolding what they enfold, and without our expending even a small part of our capacity. Then, if we manage to arrange for ourselves a livelihood with some ease in it, and to win a little respect and admiration, or an intoxication of power that we taste for an hour and that soon passes, and to enjoy a little love, we reckon that we have carried off a profitable bargain from life; indeed it may go so far that we congratulate ourselves on our superiority without ever suspecting that we are among the deceived.

Among the maxims handed down from "Marcus Aurelius," the famous Roman emperor, is his saying to himself, in warning: "Do not conduct yourself as one who imagines he will live a thousand years." And wherever we turn we see harsh, naked omens saying: "The time has passed while you were heedless." Yet everyone who falls into the grip of the will to fail spends the most precious hours of his life as though he had an inexhaustible spring of time. There are, for instance, people who spend several hours in sleep beyond the measure that guarantees them full health and soundness, and there are people whose waking differs in nothing from deep slumber, for they are absorbed in pursuits that embody laziness and the killing of time: like that vast army of café fixtures who spend their hours playing cards and backgammon and dominoes, or amusing themselves by reviewing the passersby, and among them the one who sits alone, vacant-eyed, yawning or dreaming; like those infatuated with solving riddles and crossword puzzles; and like the man who has accustomed himself to sit shut up in his house reading everything that reaches his hand without direction or discrimination, until reading has become in him a disease of which no cure can be hoped.

There is a clear difference between recreation of the spirit and its blind surrender to such pursuits, and it is not difficult for us to see this difference if we attend to its existence. Nor should you forget the frequenters of the theaters, the devotees of the cinema and the horse races, those infatuated with the exchange of visits and with talk in gatherings that is all chatter, and those who, if they are not invited to a dance or a tea party, count that day as lost from their lives.

And the will to fail preys upon us by methods baser, lower, and more hidden than these. Consider, for example, the case of that great number of people who deliberately content themselves with an easy job that demands of them only a small portion of their capacity, and then create for it trivial details and immerse themselves in them until exhaustion overtakes them. Consider those who never cease beginning to prepare for higher degrees; and consider those young men who spend most of their hours in the corners of houses of ill fame; and consider, too, those sons and daughters and mothers who

think it an act of devotion to consume their lives in the lives of others who are their equals in maturity and full adulthood, forgetting that their failure to turn their latent talents to the best account has made what they offer of no benefit to those for whose sake they sacrificed life.

There are, then, all these paths, and many others besides, subject to the will to fail. But do not let it escape you that the efforts expended only appear on the surface to be vain and aimless; the truth is that each of them has a hidden purpose. For all those who perform their work with scattered effort, and the resentful and discontented, and the triflers, aim by this conduct of theirs to deceive themselves: they mean to fill the emptiness of every moment and minute of their waking hours completely, so that not the smallest gap remains through which the feeling might steal in upon them that their effort is dust without fruit — so that when night overtakes them they are still absorbed in amusement, or the burdens have reached such a pitch that they can no longer see matters as they really are.

And how hideous is the sight of them when their truth stands naked before our eyes! You see them like madmen whose wits avarice has carried off; for their life is in their hands like a treasury beyond all price, and never, so long as they live, will they win another — yet in their folly they stuff it with malignant trifles of paltry worth, and unripe experiments, and misleading passions, and vain infatuation, and counterfeit sentiments.

It is plain that all these conditions conceal one purpose, which often settles in the soul without its owner being aware: to fill life completely with paltry efforts, or with efforts spent on what is not fitting, so that no time remains to us in which to do the best work of which we are capable.

The sum of it is that the purpose is the pursuit of failure.