Life & Wisdom Quote by Al Purdy

Desperation is doing a lot of work here: it’s not a vague melancholy, it’s the panic of someone trying to contort himself into a shape the world will accept. Purdy’s line turns “adjustment” into a kind of humiliation ritual. The world isn’t merely difficult; it’s presumptively correct, and the speaker is the defective part that needs sanding down. That inversion is the subtext: society gets to be normal by making the misfit feel sick.

Coming from Al Purdy, the intent lands with particular force because his public literary persona was never the velvet-rope poet. He wrote out of working-class grit, rural Canada, bars and back roads, with a voice that often sounded plainspoken until it suddenly wasn’t. That style matters. The sentence refuses ornament the way a clenched jaw refuses small talk. “Trying to adjust” suggests effort, not laziness; he’s doing the approved thing and it’s still destroying him. The unhappiness isn’t romantic, it’s mechanical: the pain of forcing a living mind into a standardized template.

Contextually, Purdy’s life tracks the mid-century pressure to be legible: get a job, settle down, smooth out your edges, stop talking back to authority. For a poet, “adjusting to the world” can also mean trimming perception itself - learning to stop noticing what doesn’t pay. The line reads like a refusal disguised as a confession: if fitting in requires desperation, maybe the world is what needs adjusting.