Life & Mortality Quote by Karl Shapiro

Aging doesn’t just wrinkle the body; it corrodes the moral categories we use to make sense of harm. Shapiro’s line turns on a bleak pivot: the old, brutal question “Who shall die?” slides almost seamlessly into the quieter, more damning one, “Who is innocent?” The first is the language of policy, war rooms, triage - death as an allocatable outcome. The second is the language of justification, where survival itself starts to feel conditional, granted only to those who can be proved worthy.

The syntax matters. “Already old” implies this isn’t a modern crisis or a wartime aberration but a recurring human reflex: once killing becomes ordinary, innocence becomes the next battleground. “Becomes unspoken” is the real knife. It suggests that the choice of who dies never disappears; it merely retreats into bureaucratic silence and social habit. The violence doesn’t end, it just learns to speak less plainly.

Shapiro, writing in the long shadow of World War II (and as a veteran himself), is attuned to how mass death requires mass rhetoric: enemies are made guilty in advance, civilians are collapsed into “collateral,” entire groups are assigned a permanent stain. The line exposes the slippery ethics that follow catastrophe: when institutions can’t admit they’re choosing victims, they start redesigning the definition of “innocent” until the casualties look inevitable. That’s the subtext - not despair for its own sake, but a warning about the human talent for laundering lethal decisions through moral vocabulary.