Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

“Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me” is best known as the title of Richard Fariña’s second novel, published in 1966, shortly after his death in a motorcycle accident. Fariña (1937–1966) moved in the early-1960s folk and countercultural milieu (closely associated with Joan Baez, whom he married, and the broader Greenwich Village scene). The phrase fits the era’s mix of satire, disillusionment, and manic resilience, and it frames the novel’s picaresque, campus-and-underground sensibility: a world where prolonged adversity and moral inversion can make degradation feel normal—or even like progress.

The line captures psychological and social inversion: when someone has been “down” (oppressed, unlucky, depressed, or socially degraded) for so long that their baseline shifts, “up” becomes indistinguishable from continued hardship. It suggests adaptation as a survival mechanism—one can normalize suffering until it feels like improvement. In a broader cultural register, it also reads as countercultural irony: a critique of systems that redefine failure as success, or that force people to accept diminished conditions as the new “up.” As a title, it signals comic bleakness and a narrator’s skewed perspective shaped by sustained pressure.