Aging & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler swings a knife at the kind of “literary” culture that prides itself on technique while quietly losing its pulse. “Poetry” here isn’t a genre so much as a diagnostic: the capacity for intensity, compression, and moral imagination. If an era can’t tolerate that kind of heightened language and feeling, it won’t just produce fewer poems; it will hollow out every form it touches. Novels, essays, even criticism become exercises in polish rather than perception.

The jab lands in the phrase “cleverness of a decadence.” Chandler isn’t condemning intelligence; he’s indicting a particular late-stage sophistication that confuses cynicism for insight. Decadence is what happens when a culture grows hyperliterate in surfaces - style, reference, knowingness - while losing conviction that anything is worth saying plainly. “Cleverness” becomes a social currency: the wink, the snark, the ornamental sentence that signals taste without risking sincerity.

Context matters. Chandler came up in the pulp trenches, writing hardboiled fiction that smuggled lyricism through cigarette smoke and police corruption. He saw first-hand a mid-century marketplace that rewarded speed, formula, and “smart” detachment, and he fought for a prose that could still break your heart. The subtext is both elegy and warning: without poetry’s pressure on language - its demand that words mean and matter - literature slides into entertainment for the overeducated, a dazzling after-party thrown in a burning house.