Education Quote by Patrick White

Illness is doing double duty here: it is both plot device and origin story, a bureaucratic-sounding “result” that quietly rearranges an entire childhood. White’s syntax is almost comically procedural, as if a life can be filed under cause and effect. That dryness matters. It signals a narrator who distrusts sentimentality even when describing something as intimate as asthma, and it lets the emotional charge leak in sideways.

The line’s sharpest move is the collision of scale and sensation. “Sydney” arrives not as a home or a city of possibility, but as a place of “brief” visits defined by “violently asthmatic sojourns.” The word “sojourns” is grand, faintly touristic; paired with “violently,” it becomes acidly self-aware, mocking the idea of refined travel by anchoring it in bodily panic. White turns privilege (a family owning a house in the Blue Mountains) into something almost incidental, mentioned with the flat certainty of property. The real drama is respiratory and existential: movement through spaces governed by the body’s refusal.

Contextually, this is classic White: the great Australian novelist who wrote against the grain of national boosterism, sensitive to the moral emptiness that can sit inside comfort. The country school and mountain house read as airy antidotes to the city, yet the sentence doesn’t romanticize the bush. It frames geography as management strategy, a way to contain fragility. Subtext: identity is formed less by chosen adventures than by enforced detours - and the detours leave a permanent, wary intelligence in their wake.