Life & Wisdom Quote by Morris West

Modern despair, West suggests, isn’t born from poverty of comfort but from a surplus of impossible ideals. The line targets a distinctly 20th-century mood: institutions that once offered imperfect meaning (church, nation, family, local community) were increasingly challenged or replaced by glossy programs for total fulfillment. In that vacuum, “various quarters” becomes the tell. West isn’t blaming a single villain; he’s indicting a whole chorus of persuaders - advertisers selling the perfected body and home, political ideologues promising the cleansed society, even religious voices implying sanctity can be streamlined if you just try harder.

The phrase “proposed to us” carries quiet hostility. Perfection isn’t discovered; it’s pitched. That makes despair less like personal weakness and more like the predictable aftershock of living inside a sales funnel. You are measured against an abstraction designed to be unattainable, then invited to purchase the next remedy for your failure. The “impossible” is the moral charge: a culture that makes unreachable standards feel obligatory converts ordinary limitation into shame.

West’s intent is pastoral as much as literary: to reframe despair as a social symptom, not merely a private breakdown. He’s also smuggling in a defense of the human-scale virtues - compromise, muddling through, forgiveness, second chances. The sentence works because it refuses melodrama; it’s calm, almost clinical, which makes the diagnosis stingier and more credible. Despair, here, is what happens when aspiration stops being a horizon and becomes a courtroom.