Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Stevenson

There is a chill in how casually Stevenson folds dread into a birthday note. “Rather glad, really” is the dagger: a conversational shrug that refuses the melodrama we expect from end-times talk. As a poet, she knows tone is argument. The line performs an eerie kind of relief, not because death is comforting, but because witness can be a burden. She’s not just predicting catastrophe; she’s admitting fatigue with the moral labor of watching history repeat itself and being expected to respond with the correct posture of hope.

The specific intent reads like a preemptive refusal. By locating the “horrors” in the 21st century, Stevenson turns the future into something already scheduled, like a grim appointment she’s happy to miss. That move sidesteps the sentimental script of aging-as-wisdom: instead of handing down reassurance, she offers a bleak solidarity with the young, an acknowledgment that their inheritance may be worse than ours.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of progress narratives. Coming of age in the long shadow of WWII and the Cold War, Stevenson would have seen how quickly “never again” becomes “again, with new branding.” Her phrasing suggests the 20th century trained her to distrust promises of modernity: technological advancement, political enlightenment, global interdependence. The “horrors” could be war, climate collapse, surveillance, democratic backsliding; the power of the line is that it doesn’t choose, because it’s describing a mood as much as an event.

In a culture that treats optimism as civic duty, Stevenson’s candor is its own form of ethics: she won’t sell comfort she doesn’t believe.