"How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete"
About this Quote
Lewis goes for the throat of a comforting modern lie: that longevity is automatically a win. “How incessant and great are the ills…” isn’t just complaint; it’s a drumbeat. The sentence is built to feel like endurance itself, piling on “incessant,” “great,” “ills,” and finally “replete,” a word usually reserved for abundance and blessing. Here, fullness is the problem. Old age becomes not a gentle tapering but a container overflowing with affliction.
The intent is bracingly unsentimental. Lewis is pressing against the pieties that make suffering either shameful (hide it, medicate it, don’t burden anyone) or noble (a saintly trial that refines the soul on schedule). His subtext is closer to moral realism: time does not simply “add years”; it adds vulnerability, indignity, dependency, grief-by-attrition. The line’s rhetorical posture - “How…” - signals a speaker addressing an audience that would rather look away. He’s dragging the reader’s attention back to the brute facts.
Context matters because Lewis wrote as a Christian apologist who believed in meaning, not comfort. He isn’t arguing that life lacks value; he’s refusing to let spiritual platitudes anesthetize the costs of embodiment. Read against a culture that increasingly treats aging as a lifestyle to optimize, the quote lands like a corrective: if you want more years, you’re also signing up for more exposure to loss. The sharpness is the point. It’s a moral wake-up call disguised as a lament.
The intent is bracingly unsentimental. Lewis is pressing against the pieties that make suffering either shameful (hide it, medicate it, don’t burden anyone) or noble (a saintly trial that refines the soul on schedule). His subtext is closer to moral realism: time does not simply “add years”; it adds vulnerability, indignity, dependency, grief-by-attrition. The line’s rhetorical posture - “How…” - signals a speaker addressing an audience that would rather look away. He’s dragging the reader’s attention back to the brute facts.
Context matters because Lewis wrote as a Christian apologist who believed in meaning, not comfort. He isn’t arguing that life lacks value; he’s refusing to let spiritual platitudes anesthetize the costs of embodiment. Read against a culture that increasingly treats aging as a lifestyle to optimize, the quote lands like a corrective: if you want more years, you’re also signing up for more exposure to loss. The sharpness is the point. It’s a moral wake-up call disguised as a lament.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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