Life & Wisdom Quote by Laura Riding

Existence here is less a solid ground than a self-spun boundary: a life lived not at the center of meaning but along the edge of something conspicuously empty. Riding’s “hollow circle” is a brutal image of modern intellectual life as a geometry of avoidance. The circle looks complete, authoritative, even elegant, yet it encloses nothing. And we don’t merely inhabit it; we manufacture it.

The spider metaphor sharpens the accusation. Spiders don’t borrow materials; they exude them. Riding suggests that our frameworks of judgment, taste, and “reason” are extrusions of the self, not discoveries about the world. Criticism becomes a kind of artisanal enclosure, a webbing that feels productive while it mainly consolidates our own position on the perimeter. It’s an attack on the prestige economy of interpretation: analysis that feeds on analysis, argumentation whose main product is more argumentation.

“It is all criticism of criticism” lands as both diagnosis and self-implication. Riding isn’t exempting poets; she’s indicting a culture where the primary gesture is second-order: not making, not encountering, but evaluating evaluation. Historically, Riding’s career sits in the early-20th-century moment when criticism was professionalizing, hardening into schools and methods, and poetry was increasingly mediated by commentary. Her line reads like a refusal to let language be domesticated into a closed system.

The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-recursive. Riding wants to puncture the comfort of living on the rim and demand the terrifying alternative: step off the circumference, risk contact with what isn’t authored by our own thread.