Aging & Wisdom Quote by Dee Brown

There is a quiet, almost mischievous humility in Dee Brown admitting defeat to a word processor. Coming from a novelist best known for braiding painstaking research with narrative drive, the line reads less like a technophobic grumble and more like a defense of a working ritual. "Too old a dog" is folksy self-deprecation, a phrase that invites you to smile at the speaker even as it sharpens the point: creativity is not infinitely portable across tools, and the romance of friction matters. The subtext is that writing is already hard; adding a new interface can feel like swapping the challenge you chose (language, structure, voice) for one you didn't (menus, commands, a blinking cursor that suggests speed and endless revision).

Context does a lot of the work here. Brown came of age in an era when prose moved through pencils, typewriters, carbon paper, and editorial gatekeeping that made every revision feel weighty. Word processors arrived with a promise of liberation: easier drafts, cleaner pages, quicker changes. Brown's line needles that promise by implying a trade-off. Convenience can dilute commitment; infinite editability can tempt indecision. There's also a subtle claim of authorship-as-craft: the tool isn't neutral. A typewriter's clack, a page's permanence, even the cost of retyping can enforce a discipline that a glowing screen doesn't.

It's not nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. It's a sly reminder that "progress" in the arts often means re-learning how to be yourself under new conditions.