What if there were no silver lining to failure?

A recent collection of essays contests the idea of success being the only benchmark for humans to live by

- Somak Ghoshal

On 23 February 1821, a young English doctor suffering from tuberculosis breathed his last on a tiny bed in a house near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In the last six years of his brief life, this 25-year-old man, who looked more like a wispy boy, had begun to write poetry. He had even published four volumes of his work, but none had sold much or got favourable reviews. His dying wish to his friends was to have the epitaph, "Here lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water," engraved on his gravestone. It was duly honoured.

To most of his contemporaries, John Keats was just another unknown poet, destined for obscurity. No one could have guessed the love and adulation he would be receiving more than 200 years after his death. Similar fates have befallen many creative spirits before and after Keats, the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) being a classic example, who died, allegedly, in a road accident, mostly unsung and, worse, in penury. Some 70 years later, he is revered as one of the greatest Bengali poets since Rabindranath Tagore, while his works are translated widely into other languages.

So were Keats and Das failures in their lifetimes? With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to admit that they were but, from the perspective of the 21st-century free market, neither of them, indeed, didn't amount to much by the time they breathed their last. To borrow from writer Amit Chaudhuri's essay "The Intimacy of Failing," included in the recent volume On Failing edited by him, "In capitalism, only success has existence; there are no alternative, negative modes of existence."