Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Mathews

A throwaway travelogue line turns into a sly manifesto for taste. Mathews sets up Norfolk as the kind of place you survive rather than inhabit, then snaps the sentence shut with that prim British-sounding dismissal: "the less said the better". It’s not just snobbery; it’s a joke about how language itself can be an act of mercy. Some experiences don’t deserve the oxygen of description because description would lend them dignity.

Then he flips the valve: the Mediterranean is "about which the more said the better". The symmetry is the gag, but the asymmetry is the point. Mathews isn’t merely praising sunshine and ruins; he’s revealing an artistic temperament that treats the world as unevenly narratable. Certain places generate stories; others are dead zones for the imagination. The line behaves like an editor’s marginal note - cut this, expand that - making the act of selection feel like the real content.

Context matters: Mathews, later a central figure in Oulipo, loved constraint, pattern, and the wry mechanics of prose. Here the constraint is rhetorical: two clauses, mirrored structure, opposing imperatives. The subtext is that memory is curated, not archived. Norfolk gets the dignified silence of a redacted file; the Mediterranean becomes a license for excess, embellishment, even romantic mythmaking. It’s a miniature argument for why writers exaggerate some landscapes and erase others - not because truth demands it, but because style does.