"Minds will wander even during the Last Judgment"
About this Quote
Even the apocalypse can’t compete with a stray thought. Mason Cooley’s line lands because it takes the most totalizing scene imaginable - the Last Judgment, the cosmic audit, the end of all excuses - and punctures it with a small, stubborn fact of human life: attention is flimsy. The joke is dry, almost courteous, but it’s doing serious work. If minds wander at the moment the universe finally demands focus, then “focus” has never been a moral achievement so much as a temporary truce with the brain.
Cooley, best known for aphorisms that feel like cool observations and read like quiet indictments, aims at the gap between what institutions expect of us and what consciousness actually does. Religion promises ultimate clarity: a final sorting, a final meaning. Cooley replies with a shrug disguised as wit. The subtext isn’t just that people are distractible; it’s that our inner life refuses to be fully colonized by ceremony, fear, or authority. Even judgment can’t fully draft the self into line.
There’s also a sly comfort here. If the mind’s drift is inevitable, it’s also democratic: saints and cynics alike will picture lunch, an old lover, an unpaid bill, a joke they forgot to laugh at. In a late-20th-century culture increasingly organized around attention as currency and discipline as virtue, Cooley’s sentence reads like a minimalist rebellion. The human condition, he suggests, is less about grand convictions than about the ungovernable, private weather of thought - arriving on schedule, then wandering off anyway.
Cooley, best known for aphorisms that feel like cool observations and read like quiet indictments, aims at the gap between what institutions expect of us and what consciousness actually does. Religion promises ultimate clarity: a final sorting, a final meaning. Cooley replies with a shrug disguised as wit. The subtext isn’t just that people are distractible; it’s that our inner life refuses to be fully colonized by ceremony, fear, or authority. Even judgment can’t fully draft the self into line.
There’s also a sly comfort here. If the mind’s drift is inevitable, it’s also democratic: saints and cynics alike will picture lunch, an old lover, an unpaid bill, a joke they forgot to laugh at. In a late-20th-century culture increasingly organized around attention as currency and discipline as virtue, Cooley’s sentence reads like a minimalist rebellion. The human condition, he suggests, is less about grand convictions than about the ungovernable, private weather of thought - arriving on schedule, then wandering off anyway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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