"If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress"
About this Quote
Machen takes the swollen melodrama of moral panic and pricks it with a pin. The setup is Biblical: a sin so monstrous the sun averts its gaze. Then he drops the reader into the petty humiliations of bourgeois etiquette: the “red tie,” the “brown boots with evening dress.” It’s funny because the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, and Machen knows it. He’s mimicking the language of cosmic transgression to describe a social misdemeanor, exposing how often “sin” is just a costume change.
The specific intent is satirical triage. Machen doesn’t deny guilt or conscience; he downgrades one common form of it. Dreams of doom, he suggests, can be triggered by something as banal as a sartorial breach. That “safe to conjecture” is doing quiet work: the voice is dry, clinical, almost kindly, as if diagnosing a patient with a preventable illness. The subtext is sharper. Respectability culture trains people to experience social mistakes as metaphysical stains. You didn’t just look wrong; you were wrong. Etiquette becomes theology by other means.
Contextually, Machen is writing from a late-Victorian/Edwardian world obsessed with surfaces and propriety, where class belonging could hinge on tiny signals read instantly by others. His joke lands because it’s plausible: in such a regime, the fear of being seen as vulgar can feel apocalyptic. The line also anticipates a modern insight: anxiety often borrows grand narratives to justify itself. Your psyche reaches for “the sun hid his face” because “I broke the dress code” sounds too small to admit out loud.
The specific intent is satirical triage. Machen doesn’t deny guilt or conscience; he downgrades one common form of it. Dreams of doom, he suggests, can be triggered by something as banal as a sartorial breach. That “safe to conjecture” is doing quiet work: the voice is dry, clinical, almost kindly, as if diagnosing a patient with a preventable illness. The subtext is sharper. Respectability culture trains people to experience social mistakes as metaphysical stains. You didn’t just look wrong; you were wrong. Etiquette becomes theology by other means.
Contextually, Machen is writing from a late-Victorian/Edwardian world obsessed with surfaces and propriety, where class belonging could hinge on tiny signals read instantly by others. His joke lands because it’s plausible: in such a regime, the fear of being seen as vulgar can feel apocalyptic. The line also anticipates a modern insight: anxiety often borrows grand narratives to justify itself. Your psyche reaches for “the sun hid his face” because “I broke the dress code” sounds too small to admit out loud.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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