Time & Perspective Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

The line lands like a polite insult: if you cannot enjoy the present, it is not because the present is unavailable. It is because adulthood has trained you out of it. La Bruyere frames childhood not as innocence but as a temporal privilege. Children, he argues, are unburdened by the two great adult inventions: nostalgia and anticipation. They do not curate a past into an identity, or mortgage the day to a future self. The present is not a wellness practice for them; it is simply where they live.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Saying children have "neither a past nor a future" denies them the very things polite society prizes: pedigree, legacy, long-range planning. In 17th-century France, that is an implicit jab at a culture obsessed with rank, reputation, and posterity. La Bruyere, the great anatomist of manners, is not romanticizing children so much as diagnosing adults: we are so busy narrating ourselves that we miss the scene we are standing in.

"Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us" turns the observation into a moral indictment. "Us" is the courtly, literate class La Bruyere writes for - the people with diaries, anxieties, and endless social calculus. The wit lies in the reversal: we call children immature because they lack foresight, yet La Bruyere implies maturity has its own defect, a chronic inability to be where we are. The present, in this view, is not fleeting; our attention is.