Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard H. Davis

Davis doesn’t confess incompetence so much as he stage-manages it. “Very bad hand at languages” is an old-fashioned, almost breezy phrase, the kind that turns a real limitation into a social shrug. The wit is in the pairing: languages and riding, two classic marks of a certain worldly competence. If you can’t do either, you’re barred from two gates at once - the cosmopolitan salon and the man-on-horseback myth.

As a writer, Davis is also poking at his own job description. Language is supposed to be the tool he holds best, yet he’s talking about languages in the plural, the passport-stamp version of fluency that signals travel, power, and proximity to other cultures. The line reads like a gentle, self-aware protest against the era’s ideal of the well-rounded gentleman-reporter: the roaming correspondent who can banter in Paris, negotiate in Havana, then swing into a saddle as if imperial logistics were a sport.

The subtext is a small refusal. By narrowing his “cannot do” list to two items, he implies he can do plenty else - including the thing that matters most: observe, narrate, make a scene vivid. There’s also a hint of anxiety about authenticity. If you can’t speak the language or ride the horse, you’re always slightly dependent, slightly secondhand. Davis makes that dependency sound like a quirk, but it’s really an admission of how much cultural authority used to be performed through these supposedly casual skills.