"Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings"
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Harrison loads the word "awesome" with its older meaning: not Instagram awe, but dread-laced magnitude. The sentence reads like a secular sermon, yet its engine is literary, not ecclesiastical: "create ourselves" reframes morality as craft. Goodness here is not obedience to a code but a deliberate act of self-making, as if character were a manuscript you revise under deadline.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of passivity. She does not ask us to "be" good; she insists we build ourselves "in the image of goodness", borrowing the cadence of religious creation myths while stripping them of God. That move matters. In a late-20th-century landscape where faith, institutions, and public authority were fraying, Harrison relocates accountability to the one place you cannot outsource: the self. The responsibility is "to our children" and "to the future", but the first obligation is "to ourselves", suggesting that private integrity is the hidden infrastructure of public life.
Her most incisive pivot is the last clause: "the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings". She treats imagination as a political force, not a decorative talent. What we picture as possible governs what we tolerate, what we build, what we excuse. Nobility isn't mere optimism; it's a disciplined refusal to let cynicism be the default setting. The line works because it turns ethics into a cultural project: the future isn't fated, it's authored - and the quality of the story depends on the moral ambition of the people writing it.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of passivity. She does not ask us to "be" good; she insists we build ourselves "in the image of goodness", borrowing the cadence of religious creation myths while stripping them of God. That move matters. In a late-20th-century landscape where faith, institutions, and public authority were fraying, Harrison relocates accountability to the one place you cannot outsource: the self. The responsibility is "to our children" and "to the future", but the first obligation is "to ourselves", suggesting that private integrity is the hidden infrastructure of public life.
Her most incisive pivot is the last clause: "the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings". She treats imagination as a political force, not a decorative talent. What we picture as possible governs what we tolerate, what we build, what we excuse. Nobility isn't mere optimism; it's a disciplined refusal to let cynicism be the default setting. The line works because it turns ethics into a cultural project: the future isn't fated, it's authored - and the quality of the story depends on the moral ambition of the people writing it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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