"Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it"
About this Quote
Pullman’s line flatters the reader and then quietly indicts them. “Everything has a meaning” isn’t just a mystical shrug; it’s a manifesto for curiosity in a world that keeps insisting it’s random, background noise, or “just how things are.” The hinge is the conditional: “if only we could read it.” Meaning is treated less like a hidden treasure and more like a literacy problem. The universe is a text, but we’re bad at the language.
That move matters because it shifts responsibility. Instead of asking whether meaning exists, Pullman asks whether we’ve trained ourselves to notice it. “Read” implies method, patience, and interpretation: the habits of scholarship, yes, but also of ethical attention. In Pullman’s fiction, institutions often claim a monopoly on interpretation - theology, bureaucracy, scientific authority, even storytelling itself. This sentence resists that monopoly while warning that interpretation is fallible. You can misread. You can be taught to misread. You can decide not to read at all.
The subtext is anti-fatalist and anti-cynical without being naive. It doesn’t promise that meaning is comforting, only that it’s there, waiting to be decoded: in a gesture, a rule, a myth, a data point, a lie. It also hints at why stories matter in Pullman’s universe: narrative isn’t escapism, it’s a technology for perceiving. The world is dense with signals; the tragedy is our inattentiveness, not its silence.
That move matters because it shifts responsibility. Instead of asking whether meaning exists, Pullman asks whether we’ve trained ourselves to notice it. “Read” implies method, patience, and interpretation: the habits of scholarship, yes, but also of ethical attention. In Pullman’s fiction, institutions often claim a monopoly on interpretation - theology, bureaucracy, scientific authority, even storytelling itself. This sentence resists that monopoly while warning that interpretation is fallible. You can misread. You can be taught to misread. You can decide not to read at all.
The subtext is anti-fatalist and anti-cynical without being naive. It doesn’t promise that meaning is comforting, only that it’s there, waiting to be decoded: in a gesture, a rule, a myth, a data point, a lie. It also hints at why stories matter in Pullman’s universe: narrative isn’t escapism, it’s a technology for perceiving. The world is dense with signals; the tragedy is our inattentiveness, not its silence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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