Life & Wisdom Quote by William R. Benet

“Blue oblivion, largely lit, smiled and smiled at me” turns a mood into a landscape, then lets that landscape stare back. Benet stacks soft consonants and long vowels (“blue,” “oblivion,” “largely lit”) to slow the line down until it feels like drifting: the reader is lulled, almost sedated, by sound before meaning fully lands. That’s the trick. “Oblivion” should imply erasure, fear, or death, yet it arrives washed in light, “largely lit,” as if forgetting could be radiant.

The subtext is a flirtation with disappearance. By personifying oblivion as something that “smiled and smiled,” Benet gives the void a sales pitch: not a threat, but an invitation. The repetition matters; one smile could be a coincidence, two becomes insistence, like a chorus or a tide that keeps returning. The line suggests the speaker isn’t merely observing the world but being recruited by it - coaxed toward surrender, sleep, intoxication, even the erotic pull of letting go.

Contextually, Benet sits in an early-20th-century American literary moment that’s alert to beauty and fatigue at once: modern life accelerating, old certainties thinning, art responding with lyric intensity. “Blue” carries its double charge - the color of sky and sea, but also of melancholy. Put together, the phrase reads like a bright depression: a gorgeous, illuminated blankness that doesn’t attack you. It just keeps smiling until you consider smiling back.