I have presented an argument in this book for a grand scheme of failure. Grand narratives are a little out of fashion these days, as is negativity generally. If you want to be rich and successful, write a book on success, on happiness, self-esteem and positive psychology, on how to make money, or about guardian angels. I've lost count of how many acquaintances, when I told them I was writing this book, either pulled a disapproving face or made what they thought was a highly original joke about “Wouldn't it be funny if your book about failure became successful?” Ha ha, yes, wouldn't it? We should all be aware that yesterday's big new ideas and snappy jargon constitute today's forgotten books, sitting forlornly and anachronistically on the shelves of charity shops.

In my grand (“grandiose” if you want to put the boot in, to fail me) scheme, the universe is at best a chaos of intertwined or alternating forces of success and failure, of viability and fallibility, vitality and morbidity. Human life is always ambiguous. Being is indeed “haunted by non-being” in Sartrean terms. We should probably learn not to be surprised by failure or necessarily to take it too personally. Failure is pervasive, from original and continuing entropy, through geological and climatological phenomena, through all animal life including our own, and throughout all human epistemologies, inventions, institutions and relationships.