Life & Wisdom Quote by M. E. W. Sherwood

“Holland is a land of intense paradox” lands like a postcard that’s been quietly sharpened into a blade. Sherwood isn’t marveling at tulips and canals; she’s pointing to a national brand built on contradictions so extreme they start to feel unreal. The punch line comes fast: “It is quite impossible, but it is there.” That snap from “impossible” to “there” is the whole trick. Holland becomes a kind of proof-of-concept for modern life: a place that shouldn’t work on paper yet persists, stubbornly physical.

The likely context is the long tradition of outsiders trying to describe the Netherlands as engineered miracle: land wrested from sea, geometry imposed on water, a society famous for tidy order while sitting atop ecological precarity. Paradox isn’t incidental; it’s structural. “Land” itself is a provocation here, because much of it is manufactured. Sherwood’s phrasing makes the reader feel the cognitive dissonance of standing somewhere that reads like an argument against nature.

Subtextually, there’s admiration with a faint edge. Calling a country “impossible” can be praise for ingenuity, but it also hints at anxiety: if this is doable, what else can humans redesign, and at what cost? The closing “but it is there” refuses romantic metaphor and insists on fact. Whatever you think should happen - flood, collapse, entropy - the Dutch counterexample remains, calmly existing, as if daring the rest of the world to admit that “normal” has always been a negotiated illusion.