Life & Wisdom Quote by Bliss Carman

Indifference is framed here not as a dramatic villain but as a slow, silent form of corrosion, which is exactly why Carman’s warning lands. A life rarely collapses from one shrug. It collapses from the accumulation of shrugs, the thousands of tiny refusals to care, to choose, to commit. The genius of “dry-rot” is its homely specificity: not fire, not flood, not tragedy with a soundtrack, but something that eats the beams while the house still looks standing. Carman makes neglect feel physical.

As a Confederation-era Canadian poet writing at the hinge of modernity, Carman is steeped in a culture newly obsessed with speed, productivity, and public performance. Against that backdrop, indifference reads like a defensive posture: emotional cost-cutting, the refusal to be moved. The subtext is moral and psychological at once: if you don’t practice attention and feeling, you don’t remain neutral-you atrophy. “At any one turn” implies the comforting lie people tell themselves: I can drift today and correct tomorrow. Carman punctures that with the long-run logic of habit. Indifference isn’t one decision; it’s a lifestyle that gradually makes decisions impossible.

There’s also a social edge. Indifference isn’t only self-harm; it’s how communities decay without anyone doing anything “wrong” enough to notice. Carman’s line anticipates a modern anxiety: that the real threat to meaning isn’t suffering, it’s numbness. The warning is less “be passionate” than “stay porous.” Continuous, deliberate caring becomes the scaffolding that keeps the self from quietly caving in.