Parenting & Family Quote by Thornton Wilder

Nature isn’t a nurturing mother here; she’s a playwright with a cruel sense of timing. Wilder frames existence as something staged by an indifferent force that still manages to be perversely funny. The word “reserves” does double duty: it suggests a legal clause buried in fine print and a deliberate holding-back, as if catastrophe is a perk Nature keeps in her pocket for later. It’s the language of contracts applied to biology, which makes the brutality feel both impersonal and bureaucratically inevitable.

“Inflict” tilts the line away from romantic pastoralism and into the domain of injury. Whatever “jest” follows isn’t a wink; it’s an event that leaves a mark. That collision - comedy vocabulary yoked to harm - is Wilder’s point. The joke is terrifying because it arrives as a reversal: the healthy body betrays itself, the safe world turns arbitrary, the thing you thought was stable proves contingent. A “jest” is also something you’re expected to get. Wilder implies a sickening demand placed on the living: to find meaning, pattern, even humor, in what may be random misfortune.

Context matters. Wilder wrote in a century that industrialized death and made chance feel political and intimate at once: pandemics, world wars, accidents of modern life. His work often treats ordinary routines as stages where fate drops the trapdoor. This line distills that worldview: Nature doesn’t argue or explain; she simply exercises her “right,” and the audience has to decide whether to laugh, recoil, or keep going anyway.