Life & Wisdom Quote by John Fowles

Duty, in Fowles's telling, is less a noble summons than a performance with a straight face. The line lands because it punctures the romantic image of responsibility and replaces it with something closer to office theater: calendars, forms, meetings, rituals of seriousness applied to tasks that, stripped of costume, are often minor. "Pretending" is the tell. It implies not just exaggeration but complicity - a shared agreement to inflate the stakes so the machinery keeps moving and the actors keep their roles.

Fowles, a novelist preoccupied with freedom, choice, and the stories people tell themselves to avoid raw autonomy, is anatomizing a social survival tactic. Institutions run on credulity. So do families, classrooms, and bureaucracies. Calling the trivial "critical" is how we justify hierarchy ("this must be done now, by me"), how we convert time into moral pressure, how we make obedience feel like virtue instead of compliance. The sentence is also slyly self-accusing: duty isn't only imposed from above; we volunteer for it, because treating small obligations as urgent can spare us the terror of confronting larger questions.

Context matters: postwar Britain, with its stiff-lipped respectability and expanding administrative state, produced a culture where seriousness often stood in for meaning. Fowles isn't mocking work so much as the inflationary rhetoric around it. The sting is that the pose is functional. Societies require people to act as if details matter, even when they don't, because collective life is built from details. The tragedy, and the joke, is how easily the costume becomes the self.