The Consolations of Failure: Two new books look at what failing can—and cannot—teach us

Abstract

s an adolescent, I burned through belief systems. Where once I had leaned on my parents’ copy of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981) to muddle through anything that threatened my view of the world as a fundamentally hospitable place, my growing awareness of human suffering made the explanations provided by religion seem unsatisfactory. I swapped Job for John Stuart Mill and latched on to an unsophisticated understanding of Enlightenment philosophy. Its exaltation of progress and the capacity for human perfectibility provided a ready answer for a range of perceived books