This makes sense, and I think it helps my understanding a lot, but it feels importantly incomplete. What’s the meta-context you use to decide which context to use?
I can maybe guess at some of it.
You’re probably trying to get along with other people, so you look for ways their statements are true rather than false.
You probably want to save face, so you’ll avoid constructions that could reflect badly on you if quoted in a different context. (Is malicious quotation a huge problem in this society, or are there sufficient cultural antibodies against it? If the latter, what do these antibodies look like in practice?)
Are there more specific cultural rules for context-switching?
“When all its work is done” definitely supports the ironic interpretation.
I intuitively read this more as taking a little consolation in the bigness of the truth relative to the petty little intrigues and dramas that distort it. I agree that for people with out values this is illegitimate, and I think it’s kind of a stretch for the speaker, too, but I don’t see them as being cannily ironic so much a grasping for solace; same tone you get from Marcus Aurelius when he reassures you than eventually you’ll be dead.
I mean, I think the “plea for speed” is a normatively correct response to this situation, but it doesn’t feel like what the narrator is doing; he’s off nature-watching somewhere*.
(And writing poems- maybe a crux is that I feel like we’re kind of supposed to ignore that part unless she calls attention to it? Actually, how closely are you identifying Patmore with the narrator, here?)
*Which is also very healthy, to be clear, and I don’t mean to suggest I’d actually begrudge him that.
EDIT: Spelling