"They believe that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors"
About this Quote
The line lands like a dry laugh in the dark: a whole philosophy of safety reduced to the click of a lock. Maeterlinck is needling the bourgeois faith that private comfort is a force field. Close the doors, draw the curtains, keep the world out - and you can pretend the world has agreed to your terms. The sting is in the grammar: "They believe" casts the speaker as an observer of a collective delusion, and "nothing will happen" isn’t optimism so much as superstition dressed up as prudence.
As a Symbolist dramatist, Maeterlinck built theater out of invisible pressures: fate, dread, the sense that catastrophe doesn’t knock. In his work, the real action is often offstage, approaching, already underway, while characters busy themselves with rituals of control. The door becomes a prop with metaphysical ambition. It’s not just a barrier; it’s an alibi. If disaster arrives, it will feel like bad luck rather than the predictable consequence of denial.
Historically, the quote sits in a late-19th/early-20th century Europe addicted to the idea that modernity could domesticate chaos - through law, architecture, etiquette, empire. Maeterlinck punctures that confidence with a simple image: enclosure as moral escape. The subtext isn’t merely that danger persists; it’s that withdrawal is complicity. Closing the door doesn’t stop history. It just narrows your field of vision until you mistake silence for peace.
As a Symbolist dramatist, Maeterlinck built theater out of invisible pressures: fate, dread, the sense that catastrophe doesn’t knock. In his work, the real action is often offstage, approaching, already underway, while characters busy themselves with rituals of control. The door becomes a prop with metaphysical ambition. It’s not just a barrier; it’s an alibi. If disaster arrives, it will feel like bad luck rather than the predictable consequence of denial.
Historically, the quote sits in a late-19th/early-20th century Europe addicted to the idea that modernity could domesticate chaos - through law, architecture, etiquette, empire. Maeterlinck punctures that confidence with a simple image: enclosure as moral escape. The subtext isn’t merely that danger persists; it’s that withdrawal is complicity. Closing the door doesn’t stop history. It just narrows your field of vision until you mistake silence for peace.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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