On Not Being Chosen

Charlotte Dworshak

From a 2013 New Yorker article by Joan Acocella, a book review of Missing Out (and other work) by Adam Phillips

What Phillips likes best, however, is wordplay. Inversion, circumlocution, alliteration, assonance, chiasmus, paradox: there’s nothing he doesn’t go in for. “The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?”: that’s the first sentence of “Missing Out.” Repetition is his favorite. He loves it more than Poe did. In another sentence from the book, he tells us how Darwin, by subverting religion, encouraged the human-potential movement: “Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life—the promise, as we say, of getting more out of life—the unlived life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it.”