"It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf"
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Golf, in Lynd's hands, becomes less a sport than a sedative: a carefully landscaped amnesia where grief can't quite get traction. The line works because it admits, with a wry half-smile, that tragedy is the world’s baseline condition and that our minds need help forgetting it. Not through noble struggle or political awakening, but through the absurdly genteel act of chasing a small ball across a manicured field.
The subtext is double-edged. On one side is a humane recognition of psychological survival. Modern life, even in Lynd's early-20th-century frame, is noisy with catastrophe; attention is a finite resource, and golf is engineered to monopolize it. The game demands a peculiar intensity: tiny adjustments, repeated rituals, long walks punctuated by sudden failure. That concentration doesn't just distract; it crowds out existential awareness. You can't brood grandly when you're counting strokes.
On the other side is an indictment of privilege and insulation. "Almost impossible" hints at complicity: tragedy continues off the course, but the golfer's world has been curated to minimize contact with it. The deliberate contrast between "tragic" and "playing golf" exposes leisure as a moral loophole - not evil, but revealing. Lynd isn't simply praising escape; he's noticing how easily comfort converts the planet's suffering into background noise, and how eagerly we accept the bargain.
The subtext is double-edged. On one side is a humane recognition of psychological survival. Modern life, even in Lynd's early-20th-century frame, is noisy with catastrophe; attention is a finite resource, and golf is engineered to monopolize it. The game demands a peculiar intensity: tiny adjustments, repeated rituals, long walks punctuated by sudden failure. That concentration doesn't just distract; it crowds out existential awareness. You can't brood grandly when you're counting strokes.
On the other side is an indictment of privilege and insulation. "Almost impossible" hints at complicity: tragedy continues off the course, but the golfer's world has been curated to minimize contact with it. The deliberate contrast between "tragic" and "playing golf" exposes leisure as a moral loophole - not evil, but revealing. Lynd isn't simply praising escape; he's noticing how easily comfort converts the planet's suffering into background noise, and how eagerly we accept the bargain.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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