Life & Wisdom Quote by Rebecca West

West lands the knife with a question that sounds gentle until you feel the cut. "Wrong about each other" isn’t a lapse in judgment; it’s the default setting. The line turns everyday social perception into a literary act: we don’t meet people, we draft them. And because the novels are "unwritten", they can’t be audited. No editor, no footnotes, no reckoning with the chapters that don’t fit.

The genius is in the verb "composing". It implies craft, intention, even vanity. Misunderstanding isn’t just inevitable; it’s creative. We impose plot on stray details, cast acquaintances into familiar roles (villain, rival, savior, comic relief), then mistake our narrative efficiency for insight. West suggests that intimacy can be a kind of genre fiction: we learn the tropes, we recycle them, we congratulate ourselves on recognizing the type.

Context matters. West wrote in a century defined by propaganda, mass media, psychoanalysis, and total war - a period when public personas and private selves diverged sharply, and when being "wrong" about someone could be catastrophic or politically convenient. She’s also a novelist and journalist: someone professionally trained to infer motives from fragments, and suspicious of how easily inference hardens into certainty.

Subtext: empathy requires resisting the seduction of coherence. The most ethical stance toward another person might be to leave their story partially unplotted, to accept that the character on the page is partly your handwriting.