“Everything can be solved except being”

“Everything can be solved except being” is the saying the narrator recalls in the National Gallery while considering what money, art, and death can—and cannot—resolve. The thought gives a name to the passage’s central divide: practical circumstances may change, but existence remains irreducible to a problem with a solution.

The Saying in the Gallery

Having come into what he regards as a substantial amount of money, the narrator goes to the National Gallery to look at things he considers worth more than money. Before a Mark Rothko painting, he thinks of Cocteau’s saying. The setting makes the phrase more than an abstract maxim: the narrator is measuring a new financial gain against art and against the fact of being alive.

His attention moves from the painting’s colors and brushwork to his own death. He rejects the idea of death as grand; instead, he understands it as the plain difference between waking each day and no longer doing so. The saying’s distinction between what can be solved and what must simply be faced thus accompanies a reflection on mortality, rather than offering comfort or a practical answer.

Art, Existence, and Making

The passage places the saying within a tension between artistic value and the narrator’s compromised sense of his work. He has received money from a novel he regards as worthless, and he cannot make the payment disappear by declaring that he has sold out. The success of the sale changes his circumstances but does not settle his judgment of the work or his deeper unease.

That unease carries into his thoughts about writing and woodworking. He describes writing as an effort to defy form while also affirming it, an irony difficult to articulate or defend. Wood, by contrast, is tangible to him: he values its feel, smell, and weight, and finds its simplicity more real than words. His final insistence that a table is a table returns the passage from the unsolvable abstraction of being to the solid, particular presence of an object. The saying does not resolve that contrast; it helps define it.