Aging & Wisdom Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis skewers middle age with the gentlest weapon in the satirist's drawer: the promise of next week. The line lands because it doesn't describe decline as drama; it frames it as procrastination. Middle age isn't when you feel terrible all the time. It's when you feel just bad enough to keep bargaining with your own body, turning recovery into a recurring appointment you never quite make.

The intent is comic, but the comedy is diagnostic. Marquis captures a distinctly modern kind of optimism: not the heroic belief that things will improve, but the petty administrative hope that life will "get back to normal" after one more rest, one more weekend, one more less stressful stretch that never arrives. "As good as ever" is the punchline's trapdoor. Ever was already imperfect, already partly imagined. Middle age turns nostalgia into a benchmark and then uses that benchmark to keep disappointment polite.

The subtext is about control. A younger person tends to treat the body as an instrument; a middle-aged person begins negotiating with it like a colleague who's stopped answering emails. That "week or two" is the psychological coping mechanism: short enough to feel realistic, vague enough to never cash out.

In Marquis's early-20th-century America, a journalist would have watched a culture selling vigor as virtue: the rise of efficiency talk, self-improvement rhetoric, the cult of hustle before it had a name. The joke punctures that ethic. It suggests middle age isn't failure; it's the slow discovery that time doesn't respond to deadlines.