Continuing to Live
Continuing to Live - meaning Summary
Living as Diminished Repetition
Larkin presents continued life as a narrowing repetition that forces forfeiture of interest, vitality and options. He contrasts a lucky, disposable game of poker with chess’s a metaphor for constrained, consequential choices, and argues that self-knowledge becomes a tidy but limited inventory of habits. Any late understanding of how one has lived feels partial and solitary: the truth discovered at death applies only to a single, dying individual and offers little solace.
Read Complete AnalysesContinuing to live -- that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries -- Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies. This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise -- Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it's chess. And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what's the profit? Only that, in time, We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess, On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied only to one man once, And that one dying.
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