"The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss"
About this Quote
Nostalgia loves to masquerade as history, and Penelope Lively punctures that habit with a neat reversal: what we call “change” is often just a polite synonym for “loss.” Her first clause names the default mood of century-thinking. When people survey the past hundred years, they inventory vanished shopfronts, loosened manners, broken rituals, the neighborliness that supposedly evaporated sometime after the war. “Consideration” sounds almost scholarly, but it’s really a diagnosis of a cultural reflex: we mourn first because mourning flatters the mourner. It implies we were there for something truer.
Then Lively pivots, not with sentiment but with a quiet moral correction: social change is “gain rather than loss.” The phrasing matters. She doesn’t deny that things disappear; she refuses the accounting system that treats vanished customs as inherently valuable and new freedoms as suspect. “Social change” is pointedly not about gadgets or architecture but about power: who gets to speak, to vote, to work, to love openly, to be protected by law. Those are gains that rarely feel picturesque, which is why they’re easy to overlook when the conversation is dominated by aesthetics and ambience.
The subtext is a warning about selective grief. “Loss” often means the loss of someone’s comfort, someone’s primacy, someone’s ability to define normal. Lively, a novelist steeped in memory and place, acknowledges the ache of time’s erasures while insisting we not romanticize the structures that made earlier eras feel stable. Her line asks readers to hold two truths at once: the past can be dear, and the past can be unjust.
Then Lively pivots, not with sentiment but with a quiet moral correction: social change is “gain rather than loss.” The phrasing matters. She doesn’t deny that things disappear; she refuses the accounting system that treats vanished customs as inherently valuable and new freedoms as suspect. “Social change” is pointedly not about gadgets or architecture but about power: who gets to speak, to vote, to work, to love openly, to be protected by law. Those are gains that rarely feel picturesque, which is why they’re easy to overlook when the conversation is dominated by aesthetics and ambience.
The subtext is a warning about selective grief. “Loss” often means the loss of someone’s comfort, someone’s primacy, someone’s ability to define normal. Lively, a novelist steeped in memory and place, acknowledges the ache of time’s erasures while insisting we not romanticize the structures that made earlier eras feel stable. Her line asks readers to hold two truths at once: the past can be dear, and the past can be unjust.
Quote Details
| Topic | Change |
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