The splendid conspiracy

Should I live long enough I may come to understand why the word failure has become such a popular word. The word seems to have been introduced into the english language by an Irishman, but it's now found its way into the international vocabularly as if it was there all the time.

People cling to the word failure as if it is a lifeboat. The word's so strong, has so much muscle, that it's now a concept embraced by both the critical class, who distance themselves from it while holding it dear, and those who've lost all hope, having none to begin with.

I gave up on a book I was reading last night. I failed. The book was written by a Frenchman. I'd read one of his earlier books, a book in which sleep was the main character,  becoming entranced page-by-page by the hypnotic suggestion offered by his human characters that sleep itself solves everything, that the world is better off asleep, that sleep is the thing worth striving for, the great prize, not power or prestige or even the notion of understanding one's own life. I'd understood that book of his directly in proportion to misunderstanding this book of his I was currently reading, and gave up halfway through, failing. 

Failing, I started digging into my failure, getting deep enough to see that this failure wasn't mine alone, that the writer of the book had some stake in the failure, that it was properly ours to share, disproportionately perhaps, the failure could be more on my end than his or his than mine. And then I closed that book forever.

In any event, I am a failure: a man who believes he can only talk to other men but who is only understood by women. From now on I'm writing the word failure in black ink so that it means something.