Time & Perspective Quote by Dag Hammarskjold

Hammarskjold takes a word that usually arrives dressed as either romance (your “calling”) or menace (your “fate”) and strips it down to a disciplined, almost bureaucratic humility. “Not to be desired and not to be avoided” reads like a rule for operating in history without succumbing to it: don’t fetishize destiny as a private entitlement, and don’t treat it as a doom you can outmaneuver. For a diplomat who spent his life inside the machinery of crisis, that refusal of melodrama is the point. It’s a stance meant to keep you steady when events invite either vanity or panic.

The subtext is a defense of moral seriousness without sentimental certainty. Hammarskjold calls destiny a “mystery,” but immediately limits the kind of mystery he means: not anti-intellectual fog, not superstition, not a permission slip to stop thinking. “Not contrary to reason” signals a modern conscience trying to reconcile faith in meaning with the postwar suspicion that history is just violence plus paperwork. He’s arguing for an intelligible world without claiming full access to its blueprint.

Context matters: as UN Secretary-General in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hammarskjold watched ideals collide with Cold War cynicism and decolonization’s upheavals, then died on a peace mission in the Congo. In that light, “destiny” becomes less prophecy than orientation. The line reassures the exhausted pragmatist that effort isn’t absurd, while warning the crusader that history won’t flatter them. Meaning exists, he suggests, but it doesn’t come with applause or guarantees.