Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Austin

Austin’s line is a quiet rebuke to the fantasy that land is just backdrop - a stage we can dress with whatever “civilization” we brought in our luggage. “The manner of the country” isn’t manners in the social sense; it’s the country’s temperament: climate, water, wind, distance, soil, scarcity. Those conditions don’t merely influence life; they author it. The sentence turns landscape into an active force that manufactures “usage,” the everyday habits a place requires if you’re going to last.

The subtext is anti-romantic and anti-imperial. It pushes against the settler idea that a desert can be made to behave like the Midwest if you just work hard enough, irrigate harder, and keep insisting. “Will not be lived in” is the warning label: ignore the place’s terms and you won’t just be uncomfortable, you’ll be undone - economically, physically, culturally. Austin knew the American Southwest as both ecological reality and ideological battleground, where boosterish development schemes collided with aridity and with Indigenous knowledge systems that treated land as teacher, not property.

The rhetoric works because it’s deceptively simple and non-negotiable. “Except” and “its own fashion” shut the door on compromise. Austin isn’t pleading for appreciation of nature; she’s describing a power relationship. The land sets policy. Human life, if it wants to be more than a temporary occupation, has to become fluent in the place’s grammar.