Life & Wisdom Quote by Iris Murdoch

A bad review, Murdoch suggests, belongs to the category of weather: real enough, briefly inconvenient, and ultimately indifferent to the larger project of living. The line works because it’s both dismissive and oddly tender. Instead of arguing with criticism on its own terms, she shrinks it to scale by comparing it to something simultaneously factual and irrelevant to most readers: rain in Patagonia. The joke isn’t that Patagonia is trivial; it’s that the world is vast, constantly happening, and mostly outside the tiny theater where reputations get made and bruised.

Murdoch’s intent isn’t to romanticize the misunderstood artist so much as to puncture the inflated authority of cultural gatekeeping. Reviews feel enormous because they’re proximate: they arrive in your paper, your inbox, your head. Patagonia’s rain is the opposite - distant, unbothered by your feelings, continuing regardless of your career narrative. That distance is the point. She’s advocating a kind of moral geography: don’t let the local storm in the literary scene convince you it’s the climate.

The subtext, especially coming from a novelist-philosopher steeped in questions of attention and self-deception, is a warning about ego. Obsessing over a bad review is a form of self-enclosure; it turns art into a referendum on the self. By invoking far-off weather, Murdoch nudges the writer back toward humility, and back toward work: keep writing, keep looking outward, let the squall pass.