Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Mathews

“Immediately smitten” is a sly phrase for a writer like Harry Mathews: it borrows the language of romantic blitzkrieg, then redirects desire away from art objects and toward manners. Mathews isn’t talking about museums or masterworks; he’s talking about the social operating system. That distinction matters because it refuses the usual prestige economy of “culture” as taste and refinement. He’s insisting that the real tell of a society isn’t what it applauds on stage but how it treats you at the table, on the street, in the small transactions where nobody’s performing for history.

The subtext is both admiration and critique. Admiration, because he’s describing a kind of ethical aesthetics: behavior as a form, a style, a shared grammar. Critique, because “high culture” is framed as insufficient, even distractive - a glossy export that can coexist with everyday coldness. Mathews’ attraction is “immediate,” suggesting an almost involuntary recognition: you feel a culture before you can argue for it. That’s a writer’s way of validating lived experience over theory, vibe over ideology, without making it mushy.

Contextually, Mathews sits in an international, cross-pollinated literary world (Oulipo, expatriate circuits) where “culture” is often fetishized as sophistication. This line pushes back against that cosmopolitan vanity. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-snob. The point isn’t that art doesn’t matter - it’s that a culture’s deepest masterpiece might be its default courtesy, its baseline attention to other people’s personhood.