Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joyce Cary

Love, Cary insists, is a craft project, not a harvest. The line takes a familiar romantic expectation - that real love should arrive “naturally,” ripened by fate - and punctures it with a deliberately homely image: it doesn’t “grow on trees.” Then he spikes that cliché with “apples in Eden,” importing the whole Western fantasy of effortless abundance and moral innocence. Eden is the place where you don’t have to work for anything and where desire is both inevitable and disastrous. Cary uses it as a foil: if you’re waiting for paradise-grade fruit to drop into your hands, you’re already living in a myth.

The intent isn’t anti-romance; it’s anti-passivity. “It’s something you have to make” reframes love as labor and agency - closer to building a life than finding a soulmate. That verb, make, also carries a faintly modernist impatience with inherited scripts: love isn’t an essence to be discovered but a relationship to be constructed, revised, maintained. The subtext is almost political in its skepticism toward “natural” feeling as a moral excuse. If love is made, you’re accountable for the quality of what you produce.

Then comes the real twist: “use your imagination too.” Cary isn’t advocating fantasy as escape; he’s arguing for the imaginative leap required to keep seeing another person as more than their worst day, to picture futures worth the inconvenience of change. In a century marked by war, social churn, and disillusionment, he’s offering a bracing alternative to sentimental destiny: love as an art, made under pressure, by choice.