Faith & Spirit Quote by Simon Raven

Desperation and bathos collide in that jump-cut from existential dread to petty gambling. Raven’s line works because it refuses the noble register we expect from a plea to God. The first sentence is pure collapse: “How can I go on with this?” It’s the language of someone staring down debt, grief, boredom, or moral failure. Then the prayer swerves into a football pool, puncturing the melodrama with something small, grubby, and recognizably modern.

That tonal whiplash is the point. Raven, a novelist with a satirist’s eye for self-deception, sketches a whole psychology in two beats: the need to feel one’s suffering is cosmic, and the simultaneous hope that salvation will arrive as a cheap stroke of luck. The appeal to “Please God” isn’t piety; it’s a transactional last resort, the kind of God-invocation people make when they’ve run out of strategy and self-command. The pool is crucial because it’s not even serious gambling; it’s the modest, office-friendly dream of a windfall that would reorganize life without requiring reinvention.

There’s also a class and postwar-English subtext. Football pools were a mass habit, a respectable flutter that let ordinary people imagine sudden release from constraint. Raven turns that cultural detail into a moral tell: the speaker can’t articulate meaning, only escape. The joke lands because it’s true enough to sting. We recognize the bargain: keep me afloat, and I’ll take the miracle in small denominations.