Life & Mortality Quote by John Aubrey

Aubrey takes a biblical proverb and flips it into a piece of sly, almost mischievous consolation. He’s riffing on Ecclesiastes 7:1 ("the day of death [is better] than the day of one’s birth"), and the trick is how calmly he pushes the implication: if Scripture grants death a higher value than birth, then death can’t be treated as a grim exception to the category of “good days.” It can be filed, bureaucratically, among the “remarkable and happy” ones.

The phrasing is doing a lot of cultural work. “If Solomon counts…” sounds deferential, a scholar’s nod to authority, but it also functions as a loophole: Aubrey borrows the prestige of Solomon to launder an idea many would resist. “There can be no objection” is the real barb. It’s courtroom language applied to mortality, turning the ultimate emotional event into a matter of logic and precedent. That’s very 17th-century: an age of piety, plague, and political whiplash, but also an age infatuated with cataloguing, collecting, and classifying experience.

Subtextually, Aubrey is arguing against the panic that death should trigger. Not by denying fear, but by reframing the social script around it. Birth is noisy celebration; death is expected to be solemn. Aubrey suggests the solemnity is partly a convention, and conventions can be revised. He’s also hinting at reputation: “remarkable” implies a life brought to narrative completion, a final punctuation mark that can redeem or clarify what came before. In Aubrey’s world of brief lives and incessant loss, calling death “happy” isn’t naïveté; it’s strategy.