Life & Wisdom Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons is diagnosing a rhythm of consciousness: the swing between what we can hold in our hands and what refuses to be held at all. The line is built on a calm, almost managerial symmetry ("we often... we as often...") that quietly argues against our culture's addiction to certainty. He grants the need for the "small, concrete, limited, and certain" without sneering at it. That concession matters. It makes the second half land not as mystical posturing but as a practical counterweight: a reminder that a life lived entirely in the measurable becomes a kind of spiritual malnutrition.

The subtext is that modernity trains us to treat the unknown as a problem to be solved, rather than a condition to be inhabited. Ammons flips that. "Restored" implies we've been injured or depleted by too much abstraction or too much noise; the concrete is recuperative. But "reminded" suggests something else: the vast and the vague are not optional extras, they're native to us, easily forgotten only because we keep trying to out-organize reality.

Contextually, this fits a poet whose work is obsessed with scale - insects and weather alongside systems and entropy, the local detail as a gateway to the immeasurable. The paired adjectives do the heavy lifting: "limited" and "certain" are comforting, but they also hint at confinement; "unlimited" and "unknown" sound frightening, yet they open possibility. Ammons isn't choosing a side. He's insisting on range, on intellectual and emotional elasticity, as the antidote to both panic and complacency.