“Ours is essentially a tragic age”

“Ours is essentially a tragic age” is a passage Yolandi Von Riesen turns to while addressing her sister, Elfrieda Von Riesen. It gives language to a precarious form of hope: catastrophe has already happened, the future offers no smooth path, and living continues through the effort to make new habitats and hopes among the ruins.

Context and Source

Yolandi places the passage inside a message to Elfrieda, recalling that she has finally read the D. H. Lawrence book her sister had urged her to read. She singles out its opening paragraph and imagines having it projected in letters of light and shadow onto the front of her house. The imagined display would flicker and disappear in sunshine, a change she welcomes rather than resists.

Meaning of the Passage

The quoted words refuse both easy consolation and surrender. They begin by naming the age as tragic, then turn toward the work that follows catastrophe: people build small new habitats, form new hopes, and find ways around or over obstacles when the road ahead is no longer smooth. The insistence that people must live even after the skies have fallen does not erase the scale of loss; it places continued life alongside that loss.

Narrative Significance

The passage resonates with the message’s attention to what words can and cannot do. Yolandi asks whether words mean everything or nothing, while also wanting Lawrence’s opening to become a temporary, visible presence on her home. Its eventual disappearance in daylight suits the passage’s balance: hope is neither permanent shelter nor denial of what happened, but a thought that can be held, however briefly, while life goes on.