Time & Perspective Quote by William Ralph Inge

Middle age gets a surprising sales pitch here, but Inge can’t resist making it a moral trapdoor. The line hinges on a grotesque, medical metaphor: “fatty degeneration” isn’t just weight or softness, it’s pathology - the slow replacement of living tissue with something inert. By grafting that image onto “the conscience,” Inge turns ethical decline into a kind of internal arteriosclerosis. You don’t fall into vice with a bang; you clog up over time.

The specific intent is both consoling and warning. Inge, a clergyman writing in an era of social upheaval and post-Victorian disillusionment, wants to defend middle age as a zone of peak human competence: enough experience to see through youthful romanticism, enough energy to act, fewer illusions to maintain. But he’s also taking aim at a familiar type: the respectable older person who has learned to rationalize comfort, to confuse prudence with timidity, to let moral sensitivity atrophy into “realism.”

The subtext is almost cruelly practical about aging: character doesn’t automatically ripen into wisdom. It can curdle. “Escape” suggests effort, not destiny - a conscious resistance to the slow bribe of stability, status, and habit. The age “about fifty” lands as an observational jab, the point when a life’s compromises start presenting themselves as principles. Inge’s wit works because it’s bodily and specific: conscience isn’t an abstraction here, it’s an organ you can neglect until it stops working.