Aging & Wisdom Quote by Booth Tarkington

A “fine cushion” is a slyly domestic image for something as existential as aging, and that’s Tarkington’s quiet trick: he lowers the temperature of dread by translating it into upholstery. Happiness isn’t framed as a grand achievement or moral reward; it’s practical padding. The line flatters pleasure without romanticizing it, treating joy as a resource you can bank, stack, and later lean on when the body and the world get less accommodating.

The verb “cherish” matters. It suggests an active, almost curatorial relationship to memory: you don’t just have happy moments, you preserve them, revisit them, protect them from erosion. That’s the subtextual warning. Old age isn’t only a biological phase; it’s a hostile weather system for recollection. Forgetting, bitterness, and regret are always trying to thin the insulation. Tarkington’s instruction is really about attention and narrative control: keep your best scenes in circulation so they can counterbalance the losses to come.

Context sharpens the pragmatism. Tarkington wrote in an America accelerating into modernity, with shifting class identities and the quiet anxiety of being left behind by new rhythms, new technologies, new social codes. In that world, “happy moments” are less a permanent condition than a series of interruptions worth salvaging. The sentence also carries a novelist’s sensibility: life as a set of scenes, aging as the reread. If the later chapters turn spare, the earlier ones can still soften the chair you’re sitting in.