Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard H. Davis

Davis makes hardship sound like a party trick, and that breezy self-awareness is the tell. The sentence starts in the key of amused experiment: it has "pleased and interested" him to watch himself function amid discomfort, as if adversity were a field test of character conducted for private entertainment. That posture is classic late-19th-century correspondent bravado, the kind that treats danger and deprivation as proof of professional legitimacy. He isn’t confessing weakness; he’s curating an image of resilience.

Then comes the turn: "but as I say" signals a practiced line, something he’s repeated to himself and to others to keep sentimentality at bay. He refuses the moral arc we expect from suffering. He wasn’t "sent out here" to become kinder, healthier, or humbler. That phrase matters: it frames his presence as assignment, not pilgrimage. The implicit audience back home wants a tale of personal growth or renewed gratitude for the comforts "in the East". Davis swats that away. He’s there to observe, report, and perform competence under pressure, not to undergo a therapeutic makeover.

The subtext is a critique of the self-improvement narrative before it became a lifestyle industry: hardship doesn’t automatically ennoble; it can just be hardship. At the same time, there’s a faint nervousness under the swagger. By insisting he’s not meant to improve his temper or health, he admits those are precisely the things at risk. The line works because it balances romantic adventure with a modern, almost irritated realism about why people enter uncomfortable worlds: not to be better, but to do a job and come back with a story.