Fail Again, Fail Better

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. - Samuel Beckett

Why do NY Mets fans stay true to their team, season after losing season? The answer may have to do with the kind of delirious joy they experience when that special year comes around and they finally win the World Series. But it may also have to do with the romance of failure.

Sigmund Freud sounded a warning note against those who are “wrecked by success.” The Little Red Engine thought it could and did, but W.C. Fields was more pragmatic. “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again,” he said, adding, “Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.”

Should we keep going after failure? Does it engender greater subsequent success? Make us a “better person”? What if failure is its own reward?

Failure, as a concept, is a fundamental part of what used to be called the human experience. Beckett and William Gaddis, among others, show us a way of living with it: failing better, failing intelligently, working at something one finds worth failing at.

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This is a past event that happened on November 8th, 2025 at 2:30PM.

Participants

Michael Coffey

Writer & Editor

Since retiring from Publishers Weekly as co-editorial director in 2014, Michael Coffey has written extensively on Samuel Beckett. In addition to performance reviews in peer-reviewed Beckett journals, he has published Samuel Beckett Is Closed, an experimental work bringing Beckett into the 21st century, and Beckett’s Children, a hybrid work interweaving textual analysis and memoir. He... read more! »

Stuart Firestein

Professor of Neuroscience. Columbia University
Former Chair of Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University

Stuart Firestein is Professor of Neuroscience and former Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. His laboratory is one of the world’s leading laboratories on the neuroscience of our sense of smell. He has published over 100 scientific papers in journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of... read more! »

Christopher Lyon

Scholar & publisher

Christopher Lyon is an art historian and critic with extensive experience in producing trade and museum art publications and cultural reference books. Lyon attended NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and worked for ten years as a writer/editor and senior publications editor at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1996 to 2011 he was an acquiring... read more! »

Mark Polizzotti

Author & Translator
Director of the Publications Program, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mark Polizzotti’s books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, Why Surrealism Matters, andJump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics. His writings have appeared in Apollo, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The... read more! »

Nancy Princenthal

Writer

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer whose Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames and Hudson) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s and Hannah Wilke, and her essays have appeared in monographs on Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, Willie Cole and Gary Simmons, among many others. A former Senior Editor at Art in America, she has also written for the New York Times, Hyperallergic and elsewhere, and taught at... read more! »