Life & Mortality Quote by Jessamyn West

West’s line lands like a warning to anyone who confuses loyalty with life. “Faithfulness to the past” sounds virtuous until she spikes it with “death above ground,” a phrase that turns nostalgia into a form of polite self-burial. The intent isn’t to trash memory; it’s to indict a particular posture toward it: the dutiful preservation of what was, treated as sacred and therefore untouchable. That kind of devotion freezes you in someone else’s version of events, or in your own rehearsed story about who you used to be.

Her counteroffer is craft, not therapy: “Writing of the past is a resurrection.” Resurrection implies transformation, not simple retrieval. On the page, the past isn’t merely archived; it is reanimated, given motion, voice, consequence. Subtext: you don’t get free by refusing the past, you get free by metabolizing it. Writing becomes the act that converts experience into meaning, and meaning into agency.

The final pivot is quietly radical: “the past then lives in your words and you are free.” Freedom here isn’t amnesia; it’s ownership. Once the past has been rendered into language, it stops haunting you as an inert monument and starts existing as material you can shape, question, even contradict. Coming from a 20th-century American novelist who lived through upheaval and cultural reinvention, West is sketching a modern ethic: honor the past by remaking it, not by kneeling to it.