Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence’s opening “God how I hate” is engineered to feel impolite on purpose: a blunt exhalation that refuses the polite liberal pieties of his era, when “new countries” were marketed as fresh starts, moral clean slates, modern destinies. He flips that boosterism into a diagnosis. Newness, he suggests, is not innocence but a costume.

The barb is in the paradox: “older than the old.” Lawrence isn’t talking about years on the calendar; he’s talking about psychological age. A society that must constantly announce its novelty is already trapped in self-conscious performance, more anxious about status than an “old” culture that can afford to be bored with itself. “More sophisticated, much more conceited” lands like a double charge: sophistication as a kind of armor, conceit as the insecurity it hides. New nations, in this view, borrow manners and theories fast, then weaponize them into superiority.

The nastiest, and most revealing, line is the clincher: “only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.” Youth becomes not vigor but a tantrum, vanity as arrested development. The sting is that he equates national adolescence with old-age decline: both are obsessive, brittle, easily offended.

Context matters. Lawrence wrote amid the early 20th century’s churn of nationalism, settler modernity, and imperial aftershocks. As a writer allergic to mass society and moral earnestness, he distrusted cultures that confuse progress with self-congratulation. The intent isn’t geopolitical analysis so much as a warning about identity built on the myth of being “new”: it ages you faster than tradition ever could.