Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Farrar Capon

Aging gets reframed here not as decline but as ripening, and Capon does it with a comparison that’s deliberately risky: pastry and women, beauty and consumption, desire and appraisal. The strudel image is a bait-and-switch. It invites the reader into the familiar, shallow metric of attractiveness (the “crust” as surface, youth, sheen), then pivots to a more interesting claim: time concentrates what matters. The “filling” suggests complexity, sweetness, density - the accumulation of experience, self-knowledge, sexual confidence, emotional range. “At last into its own” carries a quiet rebuke to a culture that treats women’s value as front-loaded, best before a certain age, as if the point of a life were to peak early and politely disappear.

The intent is affectionate but not innocent. By using food language, Capon borrows a domestic, old-world comfort to smuggle in a countercultural argument: older women aren’t a consolation prize; they’re a different, arguably better, category of desirability. Yet the metaphor also betrays the era’s default male gaze. Even in praise, women are being evaluated, compared, tasted. The compliment is conditional: yes, the “crust” isn’t “lovely,” but don’t worry, there’s compensation. That tension is the subtextual tell.

Context matters: Capon, a writer with a theological bent and a fondness for earthy metaphor, often treats physicality as morally meaningful rather than embarrassing. He’s not trying to be clinical; he’s trying to puncture prudishness and age panic with a little kitchen-table provocation. The line works because it flatters maturity while exposing the criteria we use to withhold that flattery in the first place.