Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

The line lands like a deliberate misfire: “way back” collides with “10 years ago,” and the mismatch is the point. Olson isn’t offering nostalgia; he’s sabotaging it. By compressing “way back” into a mere decade, he exposes how memory doesn’t measure time by calendars but by psychic distance. A single shift in consciousness can make yesterday feel prehistoric.

As a poet of scale and “projective” force, Olson was obsessed with perception as an active instrument, not a passive recorder. The speaker’s casual phrasing mimics oral speech, but it’s also a sly critique of the way we mythologize our own past. “When I was young” signals a coming-of-age framework, the kind that usually demands sepia-toned grandeur. Then “10 years ago” undercuts the grandeur with a hard, almost comic specificity. It’s not just self-deprecation; it’s an attack on the sentimental machinery that turns youth into a sacred continent you can only visit by elegy.

Contextually, mid-century America was accelerating: technology, war aftermath, new institutions, new anxieties. In that churn, ten years could genuinely feel like a different civilization. Olson’s subtext is that modernity creates artificial geological layers in the self. The intent isn’t to romanticize youth but to show how quickly identity becomes an artifact - and how easily language, with a few familiar clichés, tries to sell that artifact back to us as truth.