Life & Wisdom Quote by Stephen Vizinczey

Vizinczey’s line turns a familiar self-care impulse into an accusation: the refusal to look at tragedy isn’t neutral, it’s a kind of aesthetic and moral illiteracy. The sentence is built like a trapdoor. “Close your eyes” repeats with a hypnotic bluntness, making avoidance feel physical, almost childish. The pivot is the pairing of “tragedy” and “greatness,” words we’re trained to keep in separate mental folders: tragedy as damage, greatness as triumph. Vizinczey insists they’re welded.

The intent is partly literary, partly civic. As a novelist and critic with a long view of European catastrophe and the 20th century’s ideological wreckage, he’s arguing for the necessity of dark knowledge: the stuff that makes art sharper and human beings less gullible. Tragedy isn’t just sorrow; it’s the revelation of limits - of character, of institutions, of fate. Greatness, in this framing, isn’t motivational-poster heroism. It’s the hard-earned scale of mind that comes from staring down what breaks people and still choosing to understand it.

The subtext is a rebuke to cultures of denial: the glossy optimism that treats suffering as a “downer,” the politics that asks citizens to look away from inconvenient deaths, the personal habit of curating a life free of discomfort. Vizinczey suggests that greatness has a cost: attention. Not voyeurism, not despair, but the disciplined willingness to witness. That’s why the line works - it makes avoidance feel like self-amputation, a closing of the eyes not only to pain, but to the full range of what human beings can be.