"If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead"
About this Quote
Burgess turns intellectual flexibility into a life sign, and he does it with the kind of casual menace only a humorist can pull off. The line is structured like a nurse's triage: no new beliefs? check your pulse. The punchline - "You may be dead" - isn’t really about mortality. It’s about the slow, respectable kind of death that passes for stability: the calcification of taste, politics, and self-conception into a permanent pose.
The intent is goading, not comforting. Burgess frames changing your mind as the default setting of a functioning person, which flips the social script. In most rooms, especially in public life, consistency is treated as virtue and revision as weakness. He calls that bluff. The subtext is that we cling to "major opinions" less because they’re true than because they’re ours - identity badges we’ve paid for with ego and social belonging. Discarding one costs you face; acquiring a new one risks making you look impressionable. Burgess’s joke makes stubbornness, not revision, the embarrassing condition.
Context matters. Writing in a period when modernism was breaking old forms and America was churning through new technologies, wars, and mass media, Burgess belonged to a culture learning that the world can change faster than inherited certainties. The line carries a quietly modern anxiety: if reality keeps updating and you don’t, you become a museum exhibit in real time. The wit lands because it’s ruthless and intimate - it asks you to audit your own mental timestamps, then dares you to claim you’re still alive.
The intent is goading, not comforting. Burgess frames changing your mind as the default setting of a functioning person, which flips the social script. In most rooms, especially in public life, consistency is treated as virtue and revision as weakness. He calls that bluff. The subtext is that we cling to "major opinions" less because they’re true than because they’re ours - identity badges we’ve paid for with ego and social belonging. Discarding one costs you face; acquiring a new one risks making you look impressionable. Burgess’s joke makes stubbornness, not revision, the embarrassing condition.
Context matters. Writing in a period when modernism was breaking old forms and America was churning through new technologies, wars, and mass media, Burgess belonged to a culture learning that the world can change faster than inherited certainties. The line carries a quietly modern anxiety: if reality keeps updating and you don’t, you become a museum exhibit in real time. The wit lands because it’s ruthless and intimate - it asks you to audit your own mental timestamps, then dares you to claim you’re still alive.
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