Life & Wisdom Quote by Harry Mathews

A “little notion” that turns into a “passionately addicted” refuge is Mathews compressing an origin story into a sly contradiction: he downplays the beginning to make the compulsion feel truer. The line performs what it describes. It starts casual, almost throwaway, then tightens into the language of necessity. “Addicted” isn’t the romantic “called to write” of workshop lore; it’s bodily, a habit you don’t fully control. For an author associated with constraint, gamesmanship, and the Oulipo orbit, that word choice matters. It hints that formal play isn’t a cool intellectual posture so much as a coping mechanism refined into art.

“Refuge through adolescence” signals a specific emotional geography: writing not as self-expression for applause but as a private room you can build inside a chaotic house. The subtext is that adolescence is survivable if you can translate it. Poetry becomes a technology for ordering feeling, giving it meter, making it negotiable. Mathews doesn’t dramatize trauma; he implies pressure without naming it, which is a writer’s move in itself.

Contextually, the quote also nudges against the myth of effortless genius. Eleven is early, but the emphasis is on practice and dependence, not talent. He frames writing as something that happened to him and then saved him, an ongoing bargain: you keep returning to the page because it once returned you to yourself. That’s why it works: it’s modest on the surface, quietly absolute underneath.