Restless, Unable to Sleep — Book of Songs, “Cypress Boat,” Airs of Bei#

Imagine someone who has already checked the lock before leaving home. He saw the bolt engage and pulled the handle. Downstairs, he feels that the check was somehow not quite conclusive. He goes back and pulls again. This time he is reassured. Yet as he leaves the compound, another doubt follows: was I really paying attention when I pulled the handle? Later, he no longer always returns. Instead, he replays the process in his mind. His body goes forward; his thoughts remain at the door.

Checking originally had a clear purpose: to establish that the door was locked. It gradually takes on another task—to guarantee that he has overlooked nothing, and will not become an unforgivable person through an oversight. The first task can be answered with finite evidence. The second asks this one check to underwrite the future. The reassurance is real, and so is its brevity. The next check is still expected to provide a reason why he may finally stop.

The outward action may not distinguish these two kinds of checking. Careful people check again, and work often requires verification. What matters is what information is actually missing, whether checking can end when the task requires, and what place it occupies in a person’s life. Compulsions in contemporary clinical usage include mental rituals, such as silent repetition, counting, and reviewing events in one’s mind. They may briefly reduce distress while consuming time and interfering with life. An observer still cannot diagnose someone from a single action.¹

The body can become involved too. Anxiety may accompany muscle tension, fatigue, headaches, or stomach discomfort. One possible process of maintenance runs as follows: discomfort draws attention toward the body; attention becomes a repeated assessment of whether things are getting worse; vigilance cannot readily subside; a passing change becomes grounds for another check. Real discomfort and its interpretation interact. “Somatization,” if it is to explain anything, must do more than tell someone that they think too much. Psychological involvement does not make a bodily symptom unreal. Nor does identifying such a cycle establish that anxiety caused the original symptom. Persistent, worsening, or disruptive physical symptoms still call for appropriate medical assessment.²

“Cypress Boat” speaks of being restless and unable to sleep, as though bearing a hidden sorrow. A sorrow can be real without having become something clearly articulated and manageable. The poem also presents appeals that find no help, and difficulty finding someone to rely upon. Its lines open a question for this essay: how does a person make danger bearable, and how can the means of doing so become a constraint?³

Freud’s theory of anxiety changed. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, he revised his earlier account of anxiety primarily as transformed, repressed libido. He understood some anxiety as a danger signal produced by the ego: anticipating a situation that could restore helplessness, the ego initiates defense. He retained another possibility as well: stimulation or excitation exceeds what the subject can manage, and anxiety arises in that helplessness. An advance warning differs from being overwhelmed. “Fear of something bad” does not capture the distinction.⁴

This revision gives symptoms a more complex place. A person may restrict a function to avoid conflict—one of the situations Freud discusses under inhibition. A substitute formation may also allow a repressed impulse to obtain some satisfaction in a transformed form, at the cost of suffering. A symptom thus both manifests a conflict and participates in handling it. A ritual may give an unbearable danger the form of a sequence of manageable actions. Yet those actions can expand into work, relationships, and rest. Removing a symptom may first expose the anxiety it had contained; maintaining it may progressively narrow life.

“Why keep doing it when you know it does no good?” is therefore not simply a question about insufficient knowledge. “No good” often means that the action has not altered the external outcome. It may nevertheless be performing another task: preserving a relationship that remains just tolerable. To understand that task, we must ask why the lock has become more than a lock. How has a single oversight acquired the weight of a verdict on the whole person?

When External Stakes Weigh Heavily, Inner Skill Falters — Zhuangzi, “Mastering Life”#

“Mastering Life” describes performance changing as the wager rises from a tile to precious goods. The skill remains the same, but something has become an object of anxious concern: when external stakes weigh heavily, inner skill falters. There is a real difference of weight here. Losing a tile and losing something that affects one’s livelihood are not equivalent. Advice to stop caring about judgment cannot erase material consequences. Employment, income, the capacity to care for others, and acceptance by a group may all turn on a decision.⁵

Yet a practical loss can connect with another question: if I lose this, what am I? Am I still worthy of love? Have I betrayed the person others believed me to be? A local outcome now does more than alter future choices. It seems to expose all previous effort as fraudulent. Anxiety gains weight because what awaits judgment is both an undertaking and a person’s place in relationships.

Lacan uses the Other to explore this dimension. Teachers, parents, partners, and institutions do evaluate us, but the Other is more than their collective name. Language precedes the individual. What counts as responsible, successful, or shameful, and what makes a good student or a dependable partner, must be expressed through existing terms and standards. A person may also imagine a position within these standards as capable of deciding, once and for all, who they are. An authority can occupy that position; no individual’s opinion exhausts it.

Questioning can therefore continue even when nobody is making an accusation. A person anticipates objections on others’ behalf, explains himself to an audience that has not appeared, or regards reassurance as evidence that others do not yet know the truth. Actual relationships leave traces here, alongside the subject’s interpretations and expectations. Following how these join together can explain more than immediately assigning every inner accusation to an external speaker.

“What does he want me to do?” develops into “What am I in his desire?” The first question seems answerable by a demand; the second is harder to settle. Fulfilling a demand does not necessarily secure the position one hoped to attain. A child can do everything well and still wonder whether he is loved or merely demonstrates someone else’s success. An adult can receive recognition yet continue to ask whether others recognize him or a function that someone else could replace him in. These are questions about desire, not evidence that the other person actually sees him this way.

Desire cannot be exhausted by a list of needs because it concerns how a subject exists in language and relationships. Lacan calls object a the cause of desire, distinguishing it from desire’s explicit target. A prize, a person, or an achievement can be pursued. The a refers instead to a remainder in the subject’s constitution within the field of the Other: something that cannot be absorbed into a complete image of the self, yet continues to cause desire. This distinction lets us ask how a target acquires its attraction, and why obtaining it can leave something unsettled. The a is neither another name for the prize nor merely a way of saying that people are never satisfied.⁶

The self-image provides a different support. I recognize myself through images such as conscientious, useful, or trustworthy, and test those images under an imagined gaze. They give life continuity, but cannot take charge of all the subject’s desire. When a person must preserve an image without a single crack, impulses, dependencies, and contingencies that do not fit it may become intolerable. External demands and self-questioning reinforce each other: I must complete the task, and guarantee that no part of me has ever contradicted this image.

We can now approach Lacan’s difficult phrase, the “lack of lack.” In Seminar X, he is concerned with a place that had allowed absence, distance, and the movement of desire becoming occupied by an excessively close presence. Demands never recede. Every word and action receives an immediate interpretation. The subject has no interval in which an answer to “What exactly are you?” is not required. What produces distress may be the other person’s very certainty: he has already explained me completely and is waiting for me to comply.⁶

Seen through this distinction, waiting can become a site of anxiety, but so can an unambiguous command. The question is what has changed in the relationship. When an evaluation remains a judgment of a piece of work, a person can respond, revise, or bear the consequences. Once it acquires the power to reveal the truth of the whole person, life can contract around a single verdict. Repeated reasoning may then shift from understanding the matter to obtaining that final judgment in advance.

Entangled in Encounters, Fighting Daily in the Mind — Zhuangzi, “Discussion on Making All Things Equal”#

The Zhuangzi joins daily encounters with struggle within the mind. Psychoanalysis presses the question further: how is that struggle organized, and what does it preserve for desire?⁵

Consider a hypothetical arrangement. Someone says: once I completely understand my motives, rule out harm to others, and establish that I will never regret it, I will do what I want. Each consideration makes sense on its own. Together they form a condition that can never be fulfilled. Action is permitted, but permission takes effect only at a moment that cannot arrive. Knowledge accumulates; action remains beyond it. Desire is preserved without having to encounter the limits that realizing it would entail.

This helps us approach Lacan’s discussion of impossible desire in obsessional neurosis. Impossibility does not merely mean that external obstacles are numerous. It also concerns how the subject arranges conditions to retain distance from desire. There can always be another preparation, a final formality missing from recognition, an Other who has yet to announce permission and to whom the decision is deferred. Real constraints on action exist. Analysis asks whether an additional guarantee, which nobody can deliver, has been placed on top of them.⁷

Repeated thought can perform different tasks within this arrangement. Some thinking produces new evidence and changes a judgment. Some seeks to undo an event psychically, as though retracing the right argument could make a mistake never have happened. Some separates a thought from the feelings and relationships connected with it, permitting endless discussion without encountering their weight. Freud discusses undoing and isolation as distinct operations in obsessional symptoms. Understanding them requires attention to what thinking does with its material, rather than treating abstract thought itself as the cause.⁴

The Other has not truly disappeared here. Someone may claim to rely only on logic while still requiring an infallible authority to guarantee that the reasoning is complete. He may even take care of everything for another person while excluding that person’s actual desire: I have worked out what is best for you; you need only accept the place I have prepared. If the other makes a demand that cannot be arranged in advance, the established order may be disturbed. Apparently independent of others, the relationship still depends on their remaining in assigned positions.

Hysteria poses a somewhat different question. The historical term has frequently carried prejudices about women’s bodies and speech. As a neurotic structure discussed by Lacan, it cannot be reduced to a female trait, feigning illness, or emotional intensity. One important way its desire is arranged involves persistently seeking an answer about oneself from the Other, while making the answer reveal its insufficiency: what grounds do you have for saying what I am? Is what you have given me really what I want?⁸

Unsatisfied desire acquires a sustaining function here. If something supplied by the Other could define the subject completely, desire would seem reduced to fulfilling that definition. Leaving a gap in the answer preserves a place from which to keep asking. Yet the subject may thereby remain dependent on the authority being questioned: it must have an answer, and must not have the final answer. A question nothing can settle can expose actual relationships to repeated disappointment.

These arrangements cannot be divided into two mutually exclusive columns. In Seminar V, Lacan already says that the obsessional and the hysteric both need to sustain an unsatisfied desire beyond demand. In Seminar VIII, he uses dissatisfaction and impossibility to distinguish ways of sustaining desire. Their emphases differ. Clinically, one must still examine how the subject repeatedly organizes relations with the Other. Procrastination, questioning, or bodily symptoms alone cannot establish a structure.⁷

There is also another level of hysteria to distinguish. In the theory of discourse developed in Seminar XVII, a subject’s questioning of the position that holds the answer presses knowledge into production. Lacan also discusses the hysterization of discourse under analytic conditions. This offers a way to understand a relation in speech: someone impelled by a division within themselves seeks from an authority the knowledge that could answer their question. This operates at a different scale from an enduring clinical structure. A forceful question may change positions within a dialogue without establishing a diagnosis of the questioner. A diagnostic label cannot invalidate social criticism.⁹

If symptoms can protect distance, preserve desire, and arrange relations with the Other, why does the person still suffer so much? Because these functions need not obey the conscious aim of happiness. Lacan uses jouissance to discuss a satisfaction beyond comfort and pleasure; a symptom, too, is more than a message waiting for someone to understand it. The dangerous misuse of this term is the leap from satisfaction in a symptom to the accusation that a person actually likes suffering. Unconscious satisfaction, conscious wishes, and relief after a ritual belong to different explanatory levels. Distinguishing them should help explain why someone is caught, rather than furnish blame with a more esoteric vocabulary.¹⁰

These arrangements still maintain a relation: awaiting permission, pursuing an answer, preserving an image. But a relation can also be lost. The person or position supporting desire can depart. At that point, preventing danger is no longer enough to explain what happens. A person must face how something already lost continues to live within them.

Feelings Follow Changing Circumstances, and Reflections Gather — Wang Xizhi, “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering”#

The Orchid Pavilion Preface moves from the pleasures of a gathering to the passage of events without erasing sorrow in the name of equanimity. Its later rejection of treating life and death, or long and short lives, as equivalent preserves the felt weight of these differences. Grief can testify to the importance of a relationship. Requiring someone to stop grieving quickly may sometimes mean requiring that relationship to stop troubling the observer.¹¹

In an appendix to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud attempts to distinguish the danger of losing an object, the pain of actual loss, and the work of mourning. These can interact without forming a simple timetable. A person can fear losing someone still present, and continue to fear new dangers after a loss. Knowing that someone has gone does not make the expectations, habits, and psychic investments connected with them disappear at once.⁴

The work of mourning in Mourning and Melancholia involves a difficulty of this kind. Reality demands acknowledgment that the object no longer exists in the same way, while specific connections keep bringing one back to it. A plan, a familiar road, an unfinished sentence can make the loss newly immediate. Gradual detachment need not be understood as a command to forget the person or quickly find a replacement. What needs to change is the mode of investment, so that life can form connections under conditions in which the loss has occurred.¹²

Melancholia draws Freud’s attention to a further change. What is diminished includes the ego’s own worth as well as the world’s attraction. Reproach can expand without limit: failing at this one thing proves that I have always been like this; others recognized me only because they had not seen clearly. Facts appear to be gathered continuously, but the conclusion already exceeds what any of them could support. A responsibility that might be borne becomes an indictment of the whole person, with no possible appeal.

Freud uses identification and ambivalence to explain one mechanism here. Feelings toward an important object may include anger, disappointment, dependence, and resentment alongside love. Losing the object does not necessarily end the relation. Through identification, the object may be taken into the ego, and reproaches once directed toward it can turn against the ego. Reading certain self-accusations only at face value would therefore miss the relational conflict they continue. In accusing oneself, one may also be attacking an internalized object.¹²

This identifies a relation that the phrase “low self-esteem” leaves unspecified, but it cannot become a universal decoding key. Self-reproach is not always resentment toward someone else. A person may indeed need to acknowledge and repair their conduct. The distinction concerns whether reproach can still address specific matters and respond to evidence and repair, or whether everything is converted into proof that the whole person is unworthy. Responsibility can lead to a next action. Total condemnation often withdraws the qualification to act, then treats the resulting incapacity as further evidence of guilt.

Contemporary clinical depression also does not coincide directly with melancholia in Freud’s essay. Persistent low mood, loss of interest, and changes in energy and other functioning require assessment in relation to duration, severity, and the broader situation. An account of loss and identification may illuminate an individual’s experience without exhausting the conditions of depression. This essay asks how the self comes to bear a harsh relationship within it. Identifying and caring for illness require further knowledge and work of their own.¹³

For this reason, a passage in Lacan’s Television must be confronted. Discussing sadness that is called depression, he uses such terms as moral fault and moral cowardice, relating them to the responsibility of thought, the unconscious, and the ethics of speaking well. His question concerns the subject’s position in speech, rather than ambition in its ordinary sense. Yet the moral force of the original is real. Interpretation cannot quietly transform it into gentle reassurance.¹⁴

A judgment is necessary here. Even where an ethical inquiry within a particular analytic relationship can question a subject’s retreat, applying it directly to people with depression in general effaces differences of symptoms, circumstances, and capacity. Suffering becomes evidence of moral failure. Distinctions have also been made within the Lacanian tradition. Discussing this passage, Serge Cottet asks whether all sadness is moral cowardice and all mental suffering should be called jouissance, distinguishing the pain of mourning from a refusal to know. There is no reason to flatten these differences again.¹⁵

Analysis can ask how a person participates in their predicament, provided it attends to the specific form of that participation and their actual capacities. An injunction to assume one’s desire can easily join the existing tribunal if it leaves unspecified what can presently be assumed and with what support. The sharper the theory, the more clearly it should distinguish between cutting into a relationship and wounding someone who already struggles to bear it.

He Still Depended on Something — Zhuangzi, “Free and Easy Wandering”#

If harsh self-interrogation can confine a person, does its sudden disappearance, accompanied by a surge of action, establish freedom? Mania makes this inference difficult.

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud attempts to understand manic triumph through the binding and release of psychic energy. He immediately raises questions that obstruct the explanation. Why does ordinary mourning not necessarily end in such triumph? Why does relief from certain obsessional self-reproaches after loss not produce mania either? Release from a burden points to a relation, but is insufficient by itself to explain the occurrence of mania. The text leaves this problem open.¹²

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud turns to the relation between the ego and the ego ideal. The ideal can serve as a position from which the ego is judged; their separation and tension make reproach possible. Freud proposes their merger in mania to explain the diminution of prohibitions and self-reproach. Yet he still acknowledges uncertainty about the basis of periodic changes and the mechanism by which some melancholic states become manic. Not every melancholia follows this course. An illuminating theoretical proposition is not an explanation of every link it requires.¹⁶

In the last session of Seminar X, Lacan works with a different set of relations. He distinguishes object a from the self-image and discusses mania in terms of a’s nonfunction: without its ballast, the subject is drawn into an endless metonymy of the signifying chain. The a cannot be translated as other people’s judgment of me, nor its nonfunction as finally no longer caring what they think. The passage concerns how, when a particular connection ceases to function, the subject is carried away by successive directions of signification.¹⁷

These accounts do not combine into a single medical mechanism. They do test a broader assumption: does having fewer constraints necessarily make an action more one’s own? Increased activity may also mean greater difficulty stopping. Reduced self-doubt may accompany a reduced ability to revise one’s judgment. If freedom is measured by excitement, speed, and certainty, it becomes difficult to distinguish the ability to act from the inability to stop.

Mania in contemporary clinical usage involves marked changes from a person’s usual mood, energy, and activity. It can include a decreased need for sleep, accelerated thought or speech, and impaired judgment and functioning. Happiness, inspiration, or one night of little sleep does not independently establish mania. Nor should an apparently invigorating state be treated as proof of successful recovery from depression.¹⁸

In “Free and Easy Wandering,” Liezi rides the wind but still depends on something. The original explores dependence and degrees of wandering freely. Here it prompts a question: after one constraint is removed, what still makes activity possible? On this basis, freedom can be described more concretely. A person can initiate an action, pause, change their mind, receive another’s response, and take finite but real responsibility for consequences. This capacity relies on bodily, relational, and environmental support. Complete independence is not its condition.⁵

Yet the free, happy, capable self that people hope to become never appears from nowhere. Ideals have origins; reproach has a vocabulary; victory must be established on some scale. The inquiry therefore has to move beyond the individual’s interior to examine how those scales become demands on life.

The Many Words of Others, Too, Are to Be Feared — Book of Songs, “I Beg You, Zhongzi,” Airs of Zheng#

In “I Beg You, Zhongzi,” longing coexists with fear of parents, elder brothers, and what others will say. A relationship already involves more than one wish. Drawing close to one person places one among the speech and demands of others. Who may associate with whom, what makes a person irresponsible, and which lives deserve admiration are governed by spoken and unspoken rules.³

The philosophical talk What Is Depression, and How Not to Be Depressed offers a line of thought worth developing: requiring someone to be happy does not always give them freedom. Happiness can become a task, an emotional result to submit for assessment. A person has finished the work but still feels obliged to love it; has maintained relationships but must demonstrate that they are fulfilling. Even tiredness needs approval. Rest becomes permissible only when exhaustion has been judged worthwhile.¹⁹

The command can also be reversed. Faced with “You must be happy,” someone insists that happiness must not come easily, lest they appear shallow, deceived, or insufficiently lucid. On the surface, the original value has been rejected. Life nevertheless continues to answer to it. Every pleasure must prove that it is no betrayal of oneself; every low mood demonstrates superior insight. If resistance can be defined only through the demand resisted, that demand continues to organize the day’s feelings.

Another form of resistance seeks finally to defeat the inner judge. I will prove stronger than it predicted and achieve something that silences every doubt. Such striving may bring real accomplishments. Yet if victory still needs recognition from that position, a success cannot automatically end judgment. Standards can rise, credit can be recalculated, and the next failure can cancel the previous victory. Competition repeatedly grants a temporary pardon without conferring the right to change the rules of the tribunal.

The strength of this analysis is its examination of apparently opposed attitudes within the same relation. It also makes the difference between permission and obligation concrete. Being allowed happiness includes not acquiring an additional guilt for being unhappy now. Being allowed to pursue achievement includes room to judge its costs, change a goal, or refuse a particular competition. Replacing “I must be happy” with “I must learn to give myself permission” may merely install a new demand in the old position.¹⁹

These changes cannot happen entirely in the mind. The ability to refuse overtime depends on workplace rules, income, and available alternatives. The ability to rest depends partly on who carries the burden of care. Knowing that an evaluation is imperfect does not necessarily remove its power to distribute opportunities. Explaining real constraints wholly as excessive concern makes the individual responsible for changing the entire relation.

Lu Xun’s “New Year’s Sacrifice” makes this difficulty unusually clear. When Xianglin’s Wife returns to work for the Lu family, the Fourth Uncle rules that she must not touch things used in the sacrifices; the Fourth Aunt stops her during the preparations. Later, Amah Liu describes punishments awaiting her after death and proposes donating a threshold as a remedy. The temple keeper initially refuses, then names a price. Xianglin’s Wife saves her wages and pays. On her return, her spirits are, for a time, visibly improved. At the winter-solstice ancestral sacrifice, she tries to pick up the wine cups and chopsticks, only to be stopped again by the Fourth Aunt.²⁰

These people exert different kinds of influence. Amah Liu proposes atonement, the temple keeper determines the donation’s price, and the Lu household controls eligibility to participate in the sacrifice. A remedy recognized in one place has no effect in another. Xianglin’s Wife does what she is told, but acceptance does not follow. Her temporary relief was not groundless: she believed a remedy could change her situation. The later blow is also more than a thought in her mind. What she has done is not recognized in another relationship.

Asking why she believed so strongly therefore does not complete the inquiry. We must also ask who defined her fault, who could declare it expiated, and who actually controlled her participation in life. The story places a concrete threshold in the way of a purely psychological explanation. While exclusion is still being enforced, even a better account of oneself cannot substitute for acceptance. The narrative makes legible how distinct actions and powers bear upon a person in succession.

Practice, approached from here, involves more than overcoming an inner voice. Some work takes place in behavior, some in relationships that can be spoken about, and some requires changes in the distribution of work, evaluation, and resources. The talk’s reflections on moving beyond victory and defeat, and changing the source of demands, can help pose these questions. Turning political participation, pure negation, or philosophical insight into a universal way out of mental suffering would again erase different people’s needs. A critique of reality that cannot let an exhausted person rest may continue to enforce the command it set out to oppose.

Wipe the Knife and Put It Away — Zhuangzi, “The Secret of Caring for Life”#

Return now to the door. The person has checked, yet feels another check is necessary. Analysis can help separate several questions. What new information might this check produce? What consequence does he most fear? Does he expect a judgment about the lock, or a guarantee that he will never fail in his responsibilities? These questions concern different kinds of work. They need not all be pressed upon someone at the moment of greatest anxiety.

When new information exists, checking and revising a judgment should remain possible. When every repetition merely renews the demand for the same absolute guarantee, supplying further reassurance may make the next repetition more indispensable. One possible direction of change is to let action gradually reach an end on the basis of limited evidence and actual responsibility, while learning to bear some remaining anxiety. That requires practical change; understanding the statement that the world contains no absolute certainty is insufficient.

For clinically significant obsessive-compulsive problems, professional care has specific work to do. Exposure and response prevention, a form of cognitive behavioral treatment, has evidence for treating OCD. It involves gradually encountering situations that evoke distress and reducing the ritual responses used to neutralize it, with appropriate assessment and planning. It has its own theoretical basis and procedures, and works at a different level from psychoanalytic understandings of desire, identification, and symptom function. Its suitability and application require consideration of the individual situation.¹

Sometimes what needs to be borne is a loss that has already occurred. No checking can undo it; no more sophisticated idea can require a person to stop hurting immediately. Mourning must gradually give a changed relationship new forms. At other times, the issue is ongoing exclusion, work burdens, or conflict in relationships. Rules, support, and viable choices then need attention. Persistent bodily discomfort requires bodily care and assessment. Distinguishing these tasks prevents “changing one’s thoughts” from being asked to do everything it cannot accomplish.

Cook Ding in “The Secret of Caring for Life” is not always fearless. At a difficult point he becomes watchful, steadies his gaze, slows his movements, and acts with great delicacy. When the work is done, he wipes the knife and puts it away. Skill includes noticing difficulty, adjusting in action, and bringing an activity to an end. Through this image, a worthwhile change in the predicament described earlier comes into view: anxiety can still be felt without acquiring the authority to postpone life indefinitely.⁵

“Mastering Life” ends with a less buoyant story. Sun Xiu tells Bianzi of his difficulties, and Bianzi instructs him in the virtue of the perfected person. After Sun Xiu leaves, however, Bianzi worries that his words may have frightened and confused him. An analogy about caring for a bird follows: giving another form of life what one regards as good may not provide the nourishment appropriate to it. The story retains a hierarchical outlook of its own. Still, the teacher’s backward glance at the consequences of teaching deserves attention.⁵

Speaking about freedom, the subject, and desire also requires that backward glance. What someone needs now may be help in bringing a repetition to an end, a chance to renegotiate a relationship, or a period of rest that need not immediately prove its value. Theory should help distinguish these needs, rather than hand over another emotional report card to complete.

The door can be locked while the possibility of an oversight remains. An undertaking can receive one’s best effort and still end in disappointment. Returning limited judgments to the matters they concern does not abolish responsibility; it makes responsibility bearable. One check need not underwrite an entire life. A person can then continue along the road with a mind that has not yet wholly settled.