Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

A line like this turns apology into a quiet act of defiance. "Forgive me" opens on the social script of obligation: you owe the world your responsiveness, your productivity, your proof of being alive at the right hours. Then Olson yanks that script sideways with a sly redundancy: "sleep until I wake up". Of course you do. The point is that modern life so often demands the opposite - sleep cut short, sleep performed on schedule, rest treated as a negotiable weakness. The phrase stages a refusal to bargain.

Olson, a central figure in postwar American poetry and the "projective verse" movement, wrote against inherited forms and the deadening pressures of institutional rhythm. His work prizes breath, measure, and bodily presence as the real units of composition. Read in that light, the line isn't only about laziness or retreat; it's about reclaiming the body's authority. Waking up becomes an internally timed event, not an externally coerced one. The humor is dry, but it carries a serious aesthetic argument: the self has a tempo, and art begins by listening to it.

There's also a communal subtext. Asking forgiveness implies an audience - lovers, friends, bosses, the culture at large - waiting to be answered. Olson's sentence doesn't plead; it resets the terms. If you want me, accept the human animal first. Rest, here, is not escape from life but a demand that life stop pretending it can run without limits.