Aging & Wisdom Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Optimism, here, isn’t a personality trait. It’s a matter of public decorum and private discipline. When Mahfouz says, "At my age it is unseemly to be pessimistic", he frames despair not as honesty but as bad manners - a kind of emotional self-indulgence that looks especially suspect on someone who’s had a full lifetime to test their judgments against reality. The key word is "unseemly": pessimism becomes an aesthetic and ethical failure, something that doesn’t fit the silhouette of elderhood.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Mahfouz lived through colonial rule, revolution, state repression, and the long hangover of modernity’s broken promises in Egypt. He also survived an assassination attempt for his writing. If anyone had permission to be dour, it was him. So the line reads as a quiet flex: I have seen enough to earn bitterness, and I refuse it. That refusal isn’t naive; it’s earned.

There’s also a novelist’s craft embedded in the sentiment. Pessimism closes the book early. It insists the ending is predetermined, the characters trapped, history fixed. Mahfouz’s fiction, even at its most disenchanted, tends to keep the street-level churn of human motive in view: people make compromises, betray themselves, surprise themselves. Calling pessimism "unseemly" is a way of defending complexity against the lazy satisfactions of doom.

In old age, he implies, you owe the living something better than your cynicism: proportion, perspective, maybe even a little mercy.