"Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life"
About this Quote
“Very tidy, is life” lands like a smirk at the end of a sentence that pretends to be comforting. Anouilh, the playwright of moral traps and compromised heroism, isn’t praising life’s neatness so much as exposing our hunger to believe in it. The line opens with a soothing generality - “Life has a way” - the kind of phrase people use to anesthetize chaos. Then it sharpens: life doesn’t just unfold; it “sets things in order and leaving them be,” as if existence were a stage manager quietly restoring props after the actors stop improvising.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s resignation: things settle, dramas cool, scandal becomes anecdote, grief becomes routine. Underneath, it’s an accusation aimed at that very settling. “Leaving them be” suggests indifference, not mercy - life as a system that doesn’t resolve conflicts so much as outlasts them. “Tidy” becomes sinister: a world where disorder gets swept away not by justice but by time, fatigue, and collective forgetting.
In Anouilh’s theatrical universe - shaped by mid-century France, occupied and post-occupied, where choices were judged under shifting lights - tidiness is suspect. History loves to file people into categories (hero, collaborator, victim) because ambiguity is hard to live with. The line mirrors that pressure: the desire for clean endings, for moral bookkeeping, for narratives that close.
It works because it performs its own critique. The syntax is prim and clipped, almost dainty, while the worldview is cold. Anouilh offers the consolation people crave, then tags it with irony: yes, life becomes orderly. That’s the problem.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it’s resignation: things settle, dramas cool, scandal becomes anecdote, grief becomes routine. Underneath, it’s an accusation aimed at that very settling. “Leaving them be” suggests indifference, not mercy - life as a system that doesn’t resolve conflicts so much as outlasts them. “Tidy” becomes sinister: a world where disorder gets swept away not by justice but by time, fatigue, and collective forgetting.
In Anouilh’s theatrical universe - shaped by mid-century France, occupied and post-occupied, where choices were judged under shifting lights - tidiness is suspect. History loves to file people into categories (hero, collaborator, victim) because ambiguity is hard to live with. The line mirrors that pressure: the desire for clean endings, for moral bookkeeping, for narratives that close.
It works because it performs its own critique. The syntax is prim and clipped, almost dainty, while the worldview is cold. Anouilh offers the consolation people crave, then tags it with irony: yes, life becomes orderly. That’s the problem.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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