Education Quote by Knut Hamsun

A writer playing the rustic in a room full of suits is never just being modest; he is staging a little coup. Hamsun’s line pretends to bow to etiquette ("distinguished an assembly") while quietly pricking it. The phrase "homespun wisdom" is a deliberately downmarket self-description, the kind that invites polite chuckles and lowers expectations. But it also smuggles in a claim: that the so-called simple, lived knowledge of a novelist is being treated as a parlor trick beside the real prestige in the room.

Then comes the sharper turn: "especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science". Hamsun isn’t simply deferring to science; he’s spotlighting the hierarchy that makes deference feel required. The sentence flatters the next speaker while exposing the social ritual of modern authority: science as the clean, credentialed future; literature as the charming, unreliable past. It’s a neat act of rhetorical judo - he yields, and in yielding he frames the audience as the kind of people who need him to yield.

Context matters. Hamsun rose during a period when scientific positivism and professional expertise were remaking public life, and his own work often resisted tidy, rational explanations of human behavior. Read that way, the joke doubles as a warning: if the room insists on measuring truth by the instruments of science alone, it risks misunderstanding the messier truths Hamsun trafficked in - mood, impulse, irrational hunger. The line’s intent is not humility. It’s a preemptive defense, delivered as a wink.