Life & Wisdom Quote by Eugenio Montale

To confess you are "perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster" is to smuggle a whole metaphysics into a shrug. Montale doesn’t proclaim belief; he qualifies it. That single adverb, perhaps, turns what could be pious certainty into modern self-awareness: the poet as someone arriving after the age of systems, scavenging old cosmologies for usable moral clarity.

Zoroastrianism’s stark dualism (Good versus Evil) has the clean geometry of a worldview that explains conflict without sentimentalizing it. Montale’s line isn’t really theological so much as diagnostic. Coming out of a 20th century that included fascism, world war, and the suffocating pragmatics of survival, he reaches for a framework that acknowledges antagonism as structural, not incidental. Life, he suggests, isn’t founded on progress or harmony but on struggle - a word that implies cost, effort, and no guarantee of victory.

The subtext is a poet’s distrust of complacent neutrality. By casting himself as a "late follower", Montale hints at the cultural exhaustion of his era: ideology everywhere, faith compromised, optimism sounding like propaganda. Yet he still insists on moral polarity. That insistence matters. It’s an answer to the temptation, common in periods of political terror, to treat ethics as relative or merely aesthetic.

What makes the quote work is its balancing act: the archaic grandeur of Zoroaster against the modesty of perhaps. Montale claims an old, severe lens without pretending he can fully inhabit it - a modern conscience borrowing ancient fire.