Daily Inspiration Quote by John Barth

A trial promises what life rarely does: an ending you can staple shut. Barth’s line is funny in that dry, procedural way - not because courts are efficient (they aren’t), but because the one guarantee we cling to in modern systems is the appearance of closure. You may not get justice, clarity, or truth. You will, however, get a decision: a stamped outcome that lets the machinery keep moving.

That’s classic Barth, the novelist who made a career out of interrogating how stories get told and how they’re forced to end. The subtext isn’t “courts are bad”; it’s sharper: institutions exist partly to manufacture narrative finality. A trial is less a moral revelation than a genre with required beats - arguments, evidence, deliberation, verdict. Even when the “right” answer is unavailable, the form demands an answer anyway.

Context matters here because Barth wrote in the postwar era when faith in grand explanations was wobbling and bureaucracy was ascendant. In that world, certainty doesn’t arrive as wisdom; it arrives as paperwork. The line needles our hunger for definitiveness: we’d rather accept an imperfect verdict than live with ambiguity. Barth’s trick is to make that impulse sound comforting for half a second, then leave you hearing the hollowness underneath - the way a “decision” can masquerade as resolution while quietly dodging the mess of reality.