Life & Wisdom Quote by Gene Wolfe

Knowledge, in Gene Wolfe's hands, doesn't sit on a shelf; it evaporates. The line moves like weather across a landscape: "changed" first, then "lost", finally reduced to "mist" and "an echo half-heard". That's not just pessimism about human memory. It's a diagnosis of how truth behaves once it enters time: warped by retelling, softened by comfort, repurposed by power, and finally aestheticized into something we sense more than we can verify.

Wolfe, a writer famous for baroque sci-fi and narrators you can't fully trust, smuggles a theory of history into a lyric. "Soon changed" implies speed and inevitability; corruption isn't a distant tragedy but the default setting. The subtext is especially pointed for a genre that fetishizes "lore" and worldbuilding. He undercuts the fantasy that any civilization, archive, or database can keep facts intact. Even written knowledge becomes an "echo" because language itself is a faulty medium: it carries sound, not substance.

There's also an almost theological humility here. Wolfe (a Catholic, and a novelist of hidden structures) often treats certainty as a temptation. The "mist" isn't only ignorance; it's the atmosphere that forms when humans insist on clean narratives over messy realities. The line works because it refuses the heroic pose of enlightenment. It suggests that what endures isn't information but residue: fragments, rumors, tonal impressions. That's unsettling, but it's also a warning to read harder, doubt the confident storyteller, and notice what's missing.