Carolina Quotes...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with God: no matter how right we are, we are wrong.
Randall Jarrell Carolinian
Source
“The Taste of the Age”, p. 40
- work
- A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
- year
- 1962
- locator
- p. 40
Cite this record
“...our quarrels with the world are like our quarrels with Go…” Randall Jarrell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-B85F8DE070. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/b85f8de070
More from Randall Jarrell
A culture is no better than its woods,” Auden writes. Fortunately for him, a book of poetry can be better than its poems. Two-thirds of The Shield of Achilles is non-Euclidean needlepoint, a man sitting on a chaise longue juggling four cups, four saucers, four sugar lumps, and the round-square: this is what great and good poets do when they don’t even bother to write great and good poems, now that they’ve learned that — it’s Auden’s leitmotif, these days — art is essentially frivolous. But a little of the time Auden is essentially serious, and the rest of the time he’s so witty, intelligent, and individual, so angelically skillful, that one reads with despairing enthusiasm, and enjoys Auden’s most complacently self-indulgent idiosyncrasy almost as one enjoys Sherlock Holmes’s writing Victoria Rex on the wall in bullet holes.
President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience — and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself — consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.