Aging & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Sackville

Laughter, Sackville suggests, has better skin than sorrow. It stays "ever young" because it’s renewable: a social spark that can be struck again and again, even when the details change. Comedy survives translation; it tolerates updates, remixes, new targets. Tragedy, by contrast, “quickly becomes haggard” when it depends on yesterday’s conventions of suffering - the stock gestures, the sentimental poses, the moral certainties that once signaled profundity. What ages isn’t grief itself but the aesthetic packaging of grief.

The sly carve-out - “except the very highest of all” - is where the line does its real work. Sackville isn’t dismissing tragedy; she’s demoting most of what passes for it. Only the rare tragic art that taps something structural (fate, guilt, irreversible choice) avoids looking dated, because it doesn’t rely on fashion to feel serious. That exception also flatters the reader: you’re invited to join her in separating enduring tragedy from melodrama.

As a poet writing in the long shadow of Victorian earnestness and into the bruised early 20th century, Sackville is also hinting at cultural fatigue. After enough public catastrophe, the solemn voice can start to sound like a costume. Laughter becomes not escapism but a way of staying alive to the present, refusing to let pain calcify into a dead language. The line’s bite is its warning: seriousness is not automatically truth, and grief without freshness turns into performance.