Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically” is the novel’s opening maxim and a compact statement of its response to catastrophe. Rather than deny suffering, the phrase turns from tragic recognition toward the difficult work of continuing to live.

The Maxim and Its Development

The novel opens by enlarging the sentence into an image of life after collapse: “The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes.” The diminutives make recovery modest rather than triumphant. There is no smooth road into the future; people must go around or scramble over obstacles, because, as the passage concludes, “We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.” The movement from ruins to habits and hopes gives the maxim its force: refusal to take tragedy tragically is not an assertion that nothing has been lost, but an insistence on living amid what remains.

Constance’s Circumstances

The narration identifies this outlook as more or less Constance Chatterley’s position. The war has brought the roof down over her head, and she has realized that one must live and learn. Her experience makes the opening image personal as well as historical: catastrophe is not an abstraction but the condition in which she must begin again. In 1917 she married Clifford Chatterley while he was home on leave; after a month together, he returned to Flanders and was sent back to England six months later, badly wounded. The maxim therefore introduces the novel’s central tension between the devastation of the past and the necessity of making a life beyond it.