Aging & Wisdom Quote by Marya Mannes

A command that sounds like laziness is really Mannes staging a revolt against the manic, midcentury faith that everything must be fixed, optimized, improved. “Lie down and listen” makes attention itself the act: a deliberate slowing into the small, ordinarily irritating noises of domestic life. Crabgrass and a leaking faucet are the classic low-grade enemies of the competent household - the kinds of problems that advertise neglect to neighbors and to your own anxious conscience. Mannes chooses them precisely because they’re petty, endless, and socially policed. You can win a battle against crabgrass, but not the war; you can tighten the faucet, then watch something else break.

The line’s power is in its double instruction: not only notice the nuisance, but “learn to leave them so.” That “learn” carries the real intent. This isn’t surrender; it’s training, a re-education away from reflexive control. Mannes, as a journalist with a sharp eye for the cultural weather, is pointing at a society that confuses constant tinkering with virtue. In the postwar American home - newly marketed as a site of perfectibility through products, gadgets, and expertise - even silence becomes a problem to solve.

Subtext: your life is being eaten alive by minor repairs masquerading as moral obligations. Let some disorder exist. Let the world make its small, imperfect sounds. There’s a bracing dignity in choosing what not to mend.