Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

Generalities, in Nemerov's dry framing, aren't just intellectual shortcuts; they're psychic shelter. The line lands like an offhand aside, but it's a small accusation: we congratulate ourselves for thinking in big, portable categories, when the real motive may be avoidance. "The great outdoors" isn't a pastoral postcard here. It's the raw, unfiltered particularity of the world - weather, bodies, chance, pain, beauty - all the stuff that refuses to behave like an idea. Generalities let the mind stay indoors.

The sentence is built to mimic the very habit it criticizes. "Obvious enough" performs a shrug, as if we're already supposed to know this, and the question that follows slides the knife in: maybe abstraction wasn't invented for clarity at all, but for comfort. That's the subtext: human cognition as a defensive architecture. We don't only generalize to understand; we generalize to reduce exposure. A category can be a blanket.

As a mid-century poet with a keen eye for how language fails and flatters us, Nemerov is writing into a culture that increasingly trusted systems - psychology, bureaucracy, academic theory, political rhetoric - to tame lived reality. His suspicion reads now as pre-internet but highly current: the more we talk in templates (hot takes, demographics, "narratives"), the less contact we have with what doesn't fit. The wit is that he doesn't sermonize; he merely wonders aloud, and the wondering implicates us. If generalities are protective, the cost is sensory and moral: fewer encounters with the world as it is, and fewer obligations to respond to its irreducible details.