Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert E. Howard

Howard is describing exile without ever leaving home. The “profession absolutely foreign and alien” isn’t medicine or law; it’s writing as a social identity in a place that doesn’t have a ready-made slot for it. In early 20th-century Texas, a writer wasn’t simply someone who worked with words. He was an oddity, a person whose daily labor produced nothing you could hold, fix, or sell at the local counter. Howard frames that mismatch as “no light thing,” a blunt admission that the cost is psychological as much as economic: you don’t just choose the work, you choose a kind of sanctioned weirdness.

The Europe comparison sharpens the isolation. Europe is not only “faraway” but “unreal,” a shoreline you can imagine yet never touch. That’s the subtext of pulp-era ambition: the markets were distant, the editors abstract, the readership faceless. Howard wrote epics of barbarian worlds while living amid oil towns and small-town routines; the line turns that split into geography. The writer’s inner life becomes a continent the surrounding community treats as rumor.

The phrasing “among which one’s lot is cast” carries a fatalism typical of Howard’s worldview: you don’t pick your conditions, you endure them. The tension is that writing is both escape and trap. It promises the “shores of Europe,” the glamour of elsewhere, but it also deepens the sense that your real environment can’t fully recognize you. The sentence works because it refuses triumph. It’s ambition spoken in the register of homesickness.