Life & Wisdom Quote by John Aubrey

Aubrey tosses this off with the casual morbidity of a man who has seen how cheaply a life can be spent in 17th-century England. The line is almost aggressively plain: no heroic flourish, no sermon, just a fact delivered in the clipped, ledger-like tone that made Aubrey a patron saint of anecdotes and odd particulars. That flatness is the point. It turns near-death into something you might mention the way you’d mention bad weather, implying a world where danger is ambient and survival is less triumph than accident.

The specific intent feels social as much as autobiographical. Aubrey was a compulsive collector of lives, a gossip with archival instincts; he understood that a good story starts with vulnerability. “Twice” is doing quiet work here, hinting at pattern and predisposition: either he is accident-prone, fate has a fixation, or the era’s infrastructure (boats, bridges, roads, basic safety) is simply unreliable. Drowning, in particular, isn’t romantic; it’s humiliating, silent, and ordinary. Choosing it, instead of a duel or a battle, undercuts the glamor of peril.

The subtext is a micro-philosophy of contingency. In a time of civil war aftershocks, plague memories, and travel that routinely risked disaster, Aubrey’s understatement reads like a secular prayer: existence is provisional. The sentence also functions as self-portrait. Not the conquering gentleman, but the observant survivor - someone whose authority comes from having nearly slipped out of the record he’s trying so hard to keep.