War & Peace Quote by Edmund Wilson

Wilson turns time from architecture into combustion, and the shift is the point: the critic who spent his life building arguments suddenly admits the building metaphor is a trap. “Days” as “bricks” implies discipline, accumulation, a respectable structure you can point to and call a life. It’s the Protestant ledger version of existence: keep laying units, and eventually you earn “safety and peace.” Wilson punctures that fantasy with a harsher physics. Days don’t stack; they burn. They aren’t proof of progress so much as fuel for appetite, desire, grief, obsession - the volatile stuff he names, bluntly, “the heart.”

The line’s power comes from its self-rebuke. “If I could only remember” frames this as a recurring failure, not a revelation achieved once and banked forever. Wilson is writing against his own temperament and profession: criticism trains you to make permanence out of experience, to convert living into structure - books, judgments, systems. The subtext is that such conversion can become a kind of emotional taxidermy, preserving the outline while losing the heat.

Context matters: Wilson’s era prized the “solid house” - stability after upheaval, private refuge amid modernity’s churn. He refuses the consoling promise that enough prudent days will entitle you to calm. The alternative isn’t hedonism; it’s recognition that vitality is consumptive. To live is to spend. The heart’s fire warms and destroys, and Wilson’s rueful tone suggests he suspects we keep choosing bricks because ashes are harder to justify.