"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically"
About this Quote
Lawrence spots the defining kink of modernity: we live inside catastrophe, yet we treat it like bad weather. The line is built on a stingy paradox - “tragic age” paired with a stubborn refusal “to take it tragically” - and that mismatch is the point. It captures a culture that has normalized disaster so thoroughly that genuine tragic response (mourning, moral reckoning, collective change) feels almost indecent, melodramatic, or politically inconvenient. If everything is broken, then seriousness starts to look like a luxury.
Written in the shadow of World War I and the accelerating churn of industrial life, the sentence reads like a diagnosis of emotional coping as social style. Lawrence isn’t praising British stiff-upper-lip restraint; he’s needling it. The “we” is accusatory, implicating the reader in a kind of mass anesthesia: jokes in the trenches, parties after funerals, polite conversation while the ground shifts. Refusing tragedy becomes a survival tactic that quietly hardens into denial.
What makes the quote work is its compression of a whole psychological economy. “Essentially” suggests tragedy isn’t just a run of unlucky events; it’s structural, baked into the age’s systems and habits. Yet the refusal isn’t framed as heroic resilience. It’s self-protective, even evasive - a way to keep moving without feeling the full moral cost of what’s happening.
Lawrence, the modernist skeptic of mechanized society, is warning that when a culture can’t face its own tragedy, it doesn’t escape suffering; it just loses the language to recognize it.
Written in the shadow of World War I and the accelerating churn of industrial life, the sentence reads like a diagnosis of emotional coping as social style. Lawrence isn’t praising British stiff-upper-lip restraint; he’s needling it. The “we” is accusatory, implicating the reader in a kind of mass anesthesia: jokes in the trenches, parties after funerals, polite conversation while the ground shifts. Refusing tragedy becomes a survival tactic that quietly hardens into denial.
What makes the quote work is its compression of a whole psychological economy. “Essentially” suggests tragedy isn’t just a run of unlucky events; it’s structural, baked into the age’s systems and habits. Yet the refusal isn’t framed as heroic resilience. It’s self-protective, even evasive - a way to keep moving without feeling the full moral cost of what’s happening.
Lawrence, the modernist skeptic of mechanized society, is warning that when a culture can’t face its own tragedy, it doesn’t escape suffering; it just loses the language to recognize it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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