"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck"
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Murdoch lands the line like a raised eyebrow: romantic commitment and artistic vocation aren’t noble duties; they’re wagers you should only place when the odds feel mysteriously in your favor. The simile is deliberately deflating. Writing gets treated as destiny, marriage as milestone. Murdoch yokes them to the same emotional test: not readiness, not discipline, not social permission, but astonishment. “Amazed at one’s luck” is a quietly brutal standard because it refuses the modern language of optimization. If you’re merely “sure,” you might be rationalizing. If you feel lucky, you’ve encountered something that exceeds your own strategy.
The subtext is partly ethical. Murdoch, a novelist-philosopher obsessed with attention and self-deception, distrusts the ego’s hunger to “be” a writer or “have” a spouse. Those are identities you can perform. Luck, by contrast, implies the other person (or the work itself) is irreducibly real, not a mirror. You commit because you’re startled by what you’ve been given, not because it flatters your self-image.
There’s also a warning against the romantic myth of suffering as proof of seriousness. Marriage entered out of fear or momentum curdles into resentment; writing entered as a grim badge of authenticity becomes brittle, mannered, joyless. Murdoch isn’t promising bliss. She’s insisting on a prerequisite humility: the sense that the work - like a partner - is not owed to you. That little shock of gratitude is what keeps commitment from turning into possession.
The subtext is partly ethical. Murdoch, a novelist-philosopher obsessed with attention and self-deception, distrusts the ego’s hunger to “be” a writer or “have” a spouse. Those are identities you can perform. Luck, by contrast, implies the other person (or the work itself) is irreducibly real, not a mirror. You commit because you’re startled by what you’ve been given, not because it flatters your self-image.
There’s also a warning against the romantic myth of suffering as proof of seriousness. Marriage entered out of fear or momentum curdles into resentment; writing entered as a grim badge of authenticity becomes brittle, mannered, joyless. Murdoch isn’t promising bliss. She’s insisting on a prerequisite humility: the sense that the work - like a partner - is not owed to you. That little shock of gratitude is what keeps commitment from turning into possession.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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