Time & Perspective Quote by Mary Antin

Poverty does the quiet work of keeping people in their place, and Antin captures that brutality in a sentence that looks almost administrative. The first clause is the engine: a “struggle for a bare living” doesn’t merely make life hard, it confiscates time itself. Evening school exists, the public can congratulate itself on offering it, yet the ladder is set behind a locked door called exhaustion. Antin’s intent isn’t to sentimentalize an immigrant’s difficulties; it’s to show how structural deprivation turns opportunity into theater.

The progression of skills is telling: he can “follow a conversation or lecture” before he can “write correctly.” Speech, listening, surviving in public space - these are functional competencies, learned under pressure. Writing “correctly,” by contrast, is framed as a gatekept credential, the kind that institutions and employers treat as proof of worth. Antin’s subtext is that assimilation is judged not by whether you can participate, but by whether you can pass the minute tests of the dominant class’s standards.

Then comes the sting: “pronunciation remains extremely foreign.” The word “remains” implies permanence, a lifelong sentence handed down by early scarcity. “Extremely” hints at the listener’s impatience more than the speaker’s failure. Antin, writing in an America obsessed with Americanization, exposes how accents become moralized evidence - not of intelligence, but of not quite belonging. Even when learning happens, the stigma lingers, because the goalposts were never only linguistic; they were social.