Aging & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh sneaks a memento mori into a line that sounds, at first blush, like a commonsense shrug. The trick is the asymmetry: old age is a privilege not evenly distributed, but youth is the one democracy nobody opts out of. By yoking those two facts together, he delivers a quiet moral correction to the arrogance of the present tense. You can dismiss the elderly as irrelevant, but you cannot pretend you were never them-in-training.

The sentence also carries Waugh's characteristic chill. It refuses the cozy, inspirational version of aging as wisdom earned. Instead, it frames time as a one-way conveyor belt: everyone has been younger than he is now. No exceptions, no sentimentality, just the blunt arithmetic of experience. The subtext is accusatory. When someone condescends to youth, or romanticizes it, they are lying about their own continuity. When someone patronizes age, they're ignoring the randomness of survival.

Context matters because Waugh wrote in a century that mass-produced both early death (war, disease) and new forms of youth worship (advertising, celebrity, leisure culture). His novels are crowded with people performing identities for status; this line punctures that performance. It implies that maturity is not a personal achievement so much as time's rough handling, and that empathy is less a virtue than an unavoidable recollection. The real bite is that memory should be enough to make us kinder, yet so often it isn't.