Life & Wisdom Quote by Herman Gorter

Calling his own condition an "infantile disease" is Gorter at his most disarming: a grown poet diagnosing himself like a patient who knows the ailment is partly vanity, partly ideological fever, partly the urge to turn every conviction into a lyric. The line performs humility, but not the syrupy kind. It’s strategic self-deprecation, a way to concede susceptibility while keeping his intellect in the room. By naming himself "without a doubt" a victim, he preempts the accusation that he’s merely lecturing from above; he’s implicating himself in the very immaturity he wants to outgrow.

The "germs" and "trace" language matters. This isn’t a single bad idea to be corrected; it’s an infection with residues, habits, and reflexes. "Infantile" doesn’t just mean childish. It means early-stage: formative, sticky, hard to scrub out because it’s intertwined with identity. Gorter’s phrasing suggests the disease lives in the bloodstream of his thinking, not merely in his opinions.

Then comes the real power move: crediting "your brochure" with the cleansing. A brochure is modest, almost disposable print culture, not a monumental treatise. He’s acknowledging the era’s faith in pamphlets, polemics, and small-format argument as tools that could actually rearrange a person’s interior life. The subtext is intimate and political at once: persuasion as hygiene, critique as a kind of moral antiseptic. Gorter’s poet’s ear turns ideological self-correction into a scene of bodily purification, hinting at the modernist anxiety that one’s mind is never sovereign - it’s porous, catchable, and always at risk of relapse.