Life & Wisdom Quote by Adelbert von Chamisso

Prosperity arrives here with a yawn. Chamisso’s narrator clocks the voyage as “prosperous” only to undercut it with “to me very wearisome,” a tiny pivot that quietly rejects the era’s favorite story: that outward success should automatically feel like triumph. The line works because it treats fortune as a public verdict and fatigue as the private truth, implying a mismatch between what the world rewards and what the self can actually bear.

The physical choreography matters. “Immediately on landing” is impatience masquerading as practicality; he doesn’t savor arrival, he evacuates it. “Got together my few effects” signals self-erasure: a person with little to carry, or someone determined to travel light in a moral sense, unencumbered by status. Then the body enters the sentence. He is “squeezing myself through the crowd,” a verb that turns the social world into pressure, friction, constraint. The crowd isn’t community; it’s an obstacle to personal quiet.

And where does he run? Not to the recommended hotel, not to a celebratory table, but to “the nearest and humblest inn.” The double superlative is deliberate: proximity and humility beat comfort and prestige. Chamisso, a poet shaped by displacement (a French-born writer in German letters, living in the long shadow of revolution and Napoleonic upheaval), often writes characters who move sideways from honor toward anonymity. The “first met my gaze” seals it: he chooses what is available, not what is ideal. Subtext: survival, solitude, and a kind of ethical refusal - stepping off the stage the moment the audience gathers.