"For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread"
About this Quote
There is a polite violence in Davis's image: life as a dinner table where you get a seat but never the guest list, the menu, or the bill. The line works because it flatters the reader with adulthood ("put it as we may to ourselves") and then strips away the fantasy of control. However you narrate your autonomy, she suggests, you're still eating off arrangements you didn't make.
The table is doing double duty. It hints at providence in the older, Protestant sense (a world "spread" by forces beyond you), but it also reads as a social diagram: class, inheritance, race, gender, nation. Most of what shapes a life arrives pre-plated - language, law, money, the expectations welded to your body. "Guests" sounds gracious until you notice its built-in power imbalance. Guests are welcome, but conditional. They can be moved, managed, even shown the door. That single word quietly punctures the modern self-help promise that you can simply manifest a better setting.
Davis, writing out of a 19th-century American moral and realist tradition, uses the domestic to talk about the cosmic and the civic at once. The sentence's rhythm mimics a calming aside, like someone smoothing a napkin, while delivering a hard corrective: gratitude is not optional, and neither is humility. The subtext is not resignation so much as accountability. If you did not spread the table, your task is to notice who did, who gets served first, and what you owe to the other guests sharing your bread.
The table is doing double duty. It hints at providence in the older, Protestant sense (a world "spread" by forces beyond you), but it also reads as a social diagram: class, inheritance, race, gender, nation. Most of what shapes a life arrives pre-plated - language, law, money, the expectations welded to your body. "Guests" sounds gracious until you notice its built-in power imbalance. Guests are welcome, but conditional. They can be moved, managed, even shown the door. That single word quietly punctures the modern self-help promise that you can simply manifest a better setting.
Davis, writing out of a 19th-century American moral and realist tradition, uses the domestic to talk about the cosmic and the civic at once. The sentence's rhythm mimics a calming aside, like someone smoothing a napkin, while delivering a hard corrective: gratitude is not optional, and neither is humility. The subtext is not resignation so much as accountability. If you did not spread the table, your task is to notice who did, who gets served first, and what you owe to the other guests sharing your bread.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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