"Negative liberty expresses a fear of completion; if you never start a work, then at least there is no chance of your having finished it. To complete something is in some ways to make it disappear, not starting it is a preemptive strike against loss, a way of elegizing what has not yet disappeared. (Tellingly, Dyer has been repeatedly drawn to writing about epitaphs - ruins, cemeteries, and photographs, which are epiptaphs of a frozen moment.) Time is what completes us, and time is what forces us into the endless repetition that is boredom and the tyranny of habit. Travel, sex, and drugs - Dyer's recurrent interests - are ways to cheat time, are moments out of time. 'For a few minutes anything seemed possible,' Dyer writes of getting stoned in Rome. Getting high, Jeff Atman thinks, was 'like a concentrated version of everything he had ever wanted from life.' Getting high might be seen as a maximization of negative liberty, where everything really can be pure potential."

--James Wood, reviewing Geoff Dyer's Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Relatedly, this. Let our untested potential reign in the golden land!