"As between mileage and experience choose experience"
About this Quote
A neat little rebuke to the American cult of the odometer. Fadiman’s line treats “mileage” as the flashy metric: how far you’ve gone, how long you’ve lasted, how many rooms you’ve entered, how many years you’ve accumulated. It’s the resume version of living, quantifiable and therefore easy to brag about. “Experience,” by contrast, is stubbornly qualitative. It’s what actually happened to you and what you did with it: the texture, the recalibration of taste, judgment, and empathy. The sentence works because it forces a choice between two kinds of status - one social, one internal.
Fadiman wrote and edited in a mid-century culture that loved credentials and benchmarks: postwar expansion, corporate ladders, standardized tests, the emerging authority of numbers. As a writer and public intellectual, he’s wary of mistaking measurement for meaning. “As between” has a courtroom crispness, like he’s staging an evidence-based verdict, then immediately undermines the very idea of a measurable standard. The irony is quiet but pointed: the side that sounds more objective (“mileage”) is the less reliable guide.
There’s also a moral subtext. Mileage can be passive: time served, miles flown, years endured. Experience implies attention and change. You can log a decade without learning; you can have one difficult month that rewires you. Fadiman isn’t romanticizing hardship so much as insisting that the only real tally is transformation. In an age still addicted to metrics, the line reads less like advice than a corrective.
Fadiman wrote and edited in a mid-century culture that loved credentials and benchmarks: postwar expansion, corporate ladders, standardized tests, the emerging authority of numbers. As a writer and public intellectual, he’s wary of mistaking measurement for meaning. “As between” has a courtroom crispness, like he’s staging an evidence-based verdict, then immediately undermines the very idea of a measurable standard. The irony is quiet but pointed: the side that sounds more objective (“mileage”) is the less reliable guide.
There’s also a moral subtext. Mileage can be passive: time served, miles flown, years endured. Experience implies attention and change. You can log a decade without learning; you can have one difficult month that rewires you. Fadiman isn’t romanticizing hardship so much as insisting that the only real tally is transformation. In an age still addicted to metrics, the line reads less like advice than a corrective.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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