Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley’s joke lands because it starts by flattering the romantic myth of literature as trauma transmuted into art, then casually swaps the sacred for the shameless. “An upheaval in the author’s soul” is the high-minded premise - the kind of earnest creed you’d expect from a brooding modernist, or from a creative writing workshop that treats suffering like a prerequisite. Then he punctures it with a deadpan escape hatch: if you don’t have turmoil on hand, just borrow somebody else’s.

The intent isn’t to argue that plagiarism is fine; it’s to expose how easily literary culture rewards the appearance of depth. Benchley is pointing at the industry of seriousness: critics who hunt for psychic wounds in every paragraph, writers who feel pressured to perform anguish, publishers who package “authenticity” as a selling point. His line “handy and easily adapted” is the key twist of the knife: it turns spiritual upheaval into a household item, something you keep in a drawer next to scissors and paste.

Context matters. Benchley wrote in a period when American letters were professionalizing and modernism was making “inner life” a prestige commodity. He also came out of the Algonquin round table world, where wit was both armor and critique. The subtext is that art can be made from desperation or from craft - and that the culture often can’t tell the difference, especially when the writer can fake the right kind of gravitas. Benchley’s cynicism is generous: he’s mocking the gatekeeping myths so the rest of us can stop pretending our pain is a credential.