Life & Mortality Quote by Alan Paton

Paton opens with a triple-punch of verbs - live, struggle, die - and then yanks away the comforting premise that any of it can be neatly explained. The question isn’t a shrug; it’s a provocation aimed at the most respectable kind of certainty: the educated certainty that arrives bound in “many books.” His jab at “words too hard to understand” isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-pretense, a quiet indictment of how complexity can become a costume for authority. Wisdom, he implies, often performs itself.

The subtext is unmistakably Paton: a moral writer shaped by South Africa’s brutal hierarchies, where grand theories about order, civilization, and destiny were used to sanctify everyday cruelty. In that world, “purpose” isn’t a salon puzzle; it’s the question that follows real suffering. By insisting the end of our struggle is “beyond all human wisdom,” he refuses the tidy consolations that power likes to sell - and the tidy indictments that activists sometimes crave. If the ultimate meaning is inaccessible, then no institution, ideology, or theologian gets to claim it as property.

What makes the passage work is its disciplined humility. Paton doesn’t replace one total explanation with another. He creates a moral pressure chamber: if you can’t know the cosmic point, you’re forced back onto the only terrain you can control - how you treat people inside the struggle. The sentence carries an almost religious reverence, but without the arrogance of a revealed answer. It’s less an argument than a corrective to certainty, delivered in plain language sharp enough to cut through a library.