"When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not"
About this Quote
McGahern knows that scarcity is the great editor of human feeling. The line moves with the calm inevitability of a parish sermon, but its intelligence is secular: it isn’t praising gratitude so much as diagnosing why we so reliably fail at it. He builds the thought on a cruel rhythm - danger, preciousness; presence, tedium - as if our emotional machinery can only register value when the object is already slipping out of reach.
The subtext is less “appreciate what you have” than “your sense of reality is crooked.” When life feels stable, we don’t simply relax; we misread stability as permanence. “Tedious abundance” is especially telling: abundance isn’t framed as generosity but as deadening noise, the everyday piled so high it becomes invisible. McGahern is attentive to the way repetition corrodes attention, how the familiar turns into a kind of background hum we stop hearing until the power cuts out.
Context matters with McGahern. As a writer steeped in Irish rural life, family authority, and the slow pressures of time, he often shows how ordinary routines carry existential stakes. The sentence’s long, breathless structure mimics that drift into assumption - one clause sliding into the next the way days do, until the final corrective lands: “which we’re not.” No fireworks, just a blunt memento mori. The intent isn’t to scare; it’s to snap the reader out of the delusion that tomorrow is guaranteed, and to expose how our neglect is less moral failure than a built-in feature of being human.
The subtext is less “appreciate what you have” than “your sense of reality is crooked.” When life feels stable, we don’t simply relax; we misread stability as permanence. “Tedious abundance” is especially telling: abundance isn’t framed as generosity but as deadening noise, the everyday piled so high it becomes invisible. McGahern is attentive to the way repetition corrodes attention, how the familiar turns into a kind of background hum we stop hearing until the power cuts out.
Context matters with McGahern. As a writer steeped in Irish rural life, family authority, and the slow pressures of time, he often shows how ordinary routines carry existential stakes. The sentence’s long, breathless structure mimics that drift into assumption - one clause sliding into the next the way days do, until the final corrective lands: “which we’re not.” No fireworks, just a blunt memento mori. The intent isn’t to scare; it’s to snap the reader out of the delusion that tomorrow is guaranteed, and to expose how our neglect is less moral failure than a built-in feature of being human.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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