Aging & Wisdom Quote by Walter Scott

New Year’s cheer isn’t framed here as spontaneous joy so much as a recurring social technology. Scott’s line treats celebration as something each era consciously appoints, not merely feels: “deemed” signals judgment, consensus, even a little choreography. The year is “new-born,” a metaphor that smuggles in innocence and promise, making the calendar feel less like an accounting system and more like a living thing you can bless, toast, and restart.

Scott wrote as a major Romantic-era novelist, steeped in a culture that prized ritual, sentiment, and the romance of continuity. That matters because the sentence is quietly conservative in the best literary sense: it locates renewal not in revolution but in repetition. Every generation, he suggests, reaches for the same hinge in time to authorize its hopes. The subtext is that people need sanctioned moments to reset their moral ledgers, to smooth over what didn’t get fixed, and to recommit to communal belonging. “Fittest time” carries a whiff of practicality: the party isn’t just indulgence; it’s timed to a psychological need.

There’s also an affectionate skepticism in the sweep of “each age.” Scott universalizes across history, but the universality is observational, not preachy: watch humanity keep inventing the future on schedule. The line works because it flatters the reader’s sense of tradition while acknowledging, almost wryly, that optimism often requires a date on the calendar to feel legitimate.