"Leap, and the net will appear"
About this Quote
"Leap, and the net will appear" flatters risk with a promise of retroactive safety. Burroughs, a nature writer with a moralist’s streak, isn’t selling recklessness so much as a particular 19th-century faith: that character is forged through action, and the world tends to meet a person who commits. The sentence is built like a dare. The comma forces a breath between impulse and assurance, mimicking the moment of suspension before a jump, then delivering the soothing payoff. It’s motivational, but it’s also shrewd rhetoric: it relocates proof to the future, where you can’t fact-check it until you’ve already acted.
The subtext is less mystical than it sounds. Burroughs lived in an America intoxicated with self-reliance and expansion, where the frontier myth (physical and social) trained people to believe that improvisation is a virtue and hesitation a sin. In that cultural weather, “the net” stands in for community, opportunity, and your own latent competence - resources that often do materialize only once you’ve signaled seriousness. Quit the safe job, announce the project, make the move, and suddenly doors open because people can respond to a concrete commitment.
The line’s brilliance is also its danger. It universalizes a best-case scenario and quietly edits out who gets nets and who gets pavement: the poor, the marginalized, the chronically ill. As a piece of American optimism, it’s less a law of physics than a bet on social permission - and on a society willing to catch you.
The subtext is less mystical than it sounds. Burroughs lived in an America intoxicated with self-reliance and expansion, where the frontier myth (physical and social) trained people to believe that improvisation is a virtue and hesitation a sin. In that cultural weather, “the net” stands in for community, opportunity, and your own latent competence - resources that often do materialize only once you’ve signaled seriousness. Quit the safe job, announce the project, make the move, and suddenly doors open because people can respond to a concrete commitment.
The line’s brilliance is also its danger. It universalizes a best-case scenario and quietly edits out who gets nets and who gets pavement: the poor, the marginalized, the chronically ill. As a piece of American optimism, it’s less a law of physics than a bet on social permission - and on a society willing to catch you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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