From Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, a book co-written with Stephen Greenblatt, which will be published next month by Yale University Press.

The idea of the second chance is one of our more familiar self-cures for a certain kind of despair: the despair that comes from seeing ourselves as saboteurs of opportunity, as fundamentally self-destructive, distracted creatures whose hate is far stronger and stranger and more pleasurable than our love. In thinking about second chances, at least to begin with, it may be worth wondering what a life would be like in which there…