Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Wisdom, Le Gallienne suggests, begins the moment you stop treating other people as your unpaid curriculum. “Wholesome oblivion” is a sly, self-protective phrase: not ignorance as laziness, but forgetting as hygiene. In a culture that treats neighborly awareness as virtue - gossip as community service, vigilance as morality - he flips the script. The “neighbours” here aren’t just the folks next door; they’re the social chorus, the audience you imagine judging your choices, the petty metrics by which a community polices itself.

The line works because it smuggles a radical permission slip inside a genteel Victorian cadence. “Wholesome” neutralizes what might otherwise sound antisocial. “Oblivion” is blunt, almost scandalously so: not “indifference,” not “tolerance,” but a clean erasure. The subtext is that much of what passes for moral seriousness is really anxious surveillance - measuring yourself against others, measuring others against yourself, and mistaking that loop for insight.

Le Gallienne, a poet associated with the fin-de-siecle aesthetic mood, writes from a moment when respectability was both currency and cage. His intent reads as a defense of inner life: art, thought, and character require insulation from the neighborhood’s constant commentary. The “beginning” is key. He’s not promising enlightenment as a destination; he’s naming the first, practical step toward it: stop outsourcing your attention to the local tribunal. Only then can judgment become discernment rather than reflex.