"Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles"
About this Quote
Middle age, in Don Marquis's hands, isn't a milestone so much as a negotiated settlement. The line refuses the sentimental story (wisdom! fulfillment!) and offers a stingier, funnier consolation: you've probably learned to steal small pleasures from the wreckage. "The best that can be said" is a deliberately low ceiling, a journalist's deadpan way of puncturing the cultural sales pitch that adulthood comes with upgrades. Marquis frames middle age as damage control, and the humor lands because it respects the reader's lived arithmetic: the troubles are real, ongoing, and not the kind you outgrow.
The subtext is a kind of pragmatic stoicism dressed up as a shrug. Not heroic resilience, not self-help triumph, just competence at coping. The phrase "a little fun" matters; it's modest, almost begrudging, implying that joy in midlife isn't a grand romantic event but a practiced skill - something you learn the way you learn to pay bills on time or keep your temper in meetings. "In spite of" is the whole worldview: pleasure doesn't replace trouble; it coexists with it, like a smoke break behind the building.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Marquis wrote in an era when middle-class life was tightening under industrial routines, moral expectations, and then the shadow of war and economic instability. As a journalist and satirist, he specialized in puncturing respectable narratives. This sentence does that with surgical economy: it grants middle age one qualified victory - the ability to laugh anyway - and treats even that as a maybe.
The subtext is a kind of pragmatic stoicism dressed up as a shrug. Not heroic resilience, not self-help triumph, just competence at coping. The phrase "a little fun" matters; it's modest, almost begrudging, implying that joy in midlife isn't a grand romantic event but a practiced skill - something you learn the way you learn to pay bills on time or keep your temper in meetings. "In spite of" is the whole worldview: pleasure doesn't replace trouble; it coexists with it, like a smoke break behind the building.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Marquis wrote in an era when middle-class life was tightening under industrial routines, moral expectations, and then the shadow of war and economic instability. As a journalist and satirist, he specialized in puncturing respectable narratives. This sentence does that with surgical economy: it grants middle age one qualified victory - the ability to laugh anyway - and treats even that as a maybe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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