Life & Wisdom Quote by Adrienne Rich

The line turns the mind into a kind of zealot: its "passion" isn’t for complexity, but for singling out-for naming, sorting, isolating, making a clean figure against a messy ground. Rich’s phrasing slyly critiques that appetite. "Singling out" can sound like clarity, even moral focus; it also carries the sting of exclusion and targeting, the way categories become social machinery. The mind wants the one right meaning, the one culprit, the one identity that can be pinned down and managed.

Then Rich pivots to what refuses management: "Obscurity has another tale to tell". Obscurity here isn’t ignorance; it’s the stubborn remainder that won’t fit the mind’s filing system. The subtext is political as much as it is psychological. Rich, writing out of second-wave feminism, lesbian visibility, and a broader suspicion of institutional narratives, understood how official language “singles out” certain lives for legibility while rendering others unintelligible. Obscurity becomes a counter-archive: the half-said, the coded, the private, the not-yet-articulated.

The brilliance is the tension she refuses to resolve. She doesn’t simply celebrate ambiguity; she stages a quarrel between the mind’s hunger for clean edges and the world’s resistance to them. It’s also a quiet defense of poetry itself-a form built to let obscurity speak without being immediately reduced to a takeaway. In Rich’s hands, the murky isn’t a failure of meaning. It’s where meaning is still alive, still contested, still capable of telling a different story than the one we’re trained to prefer.