Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison is staging a small, elegant rebellion against the bean-counting mindset. In a world where land, taste, and status were increasingly measured, itemized, improved, and displayed, he chooses to praise the unprofitable. Blackbirds cost him cherries; he pays anyway, almost ostentatiously, because the return is aesthetic and moral rather than economic. The sentence is built like a ledger entry that refuses the ledger: value is declared, a loss is admitted, payment is made. Yet the currency is song.

The slyness is in that “very frankly.” He anticipates the skeptical reader who thinks nature exists to be harvested, not listened to. By announcing his candor, Addison frames generosity to animals not as sentimental weakness but as a reasonable preference: he is buying an experience. It’s early consumer logic redirected away from goods and toward atmosphere. The garden becomes less a pantry than a theater, and the blackbirds are paid performers.

Context matters: Addison, a central voice of the early 18th-century essay tradition, writes at the moment when polite society is inventing “taste” as a social virtue. This line flatters that emerging identity. To tolerate a bit of mess and loss for the sake of birdsong signals refinement, leisure, and control over necessity. It’s also a quiet ethical claim: the world is not solely for extraction; beauty deserves a subsidy. The cherries feed the birds; the birds feed the soul.