"One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty"
About this Quote
Gorky turns arithmetic into moral hygiene, and the joke lands because it’s only half a joke. “Count” looks like a humble, practical skill, but he’s really talking about reckoning: with age, power, appetite, and the stories men tell themselves to make desire sound respectable. The punchline isn’t that a fifty-year-old can’t do what he wants; it’s that he can, and society will often let him. The numbers are a thin, brutal spotlight on an imbalance everyone recognizes and many politely ignore.
The line also carries Gorky’s class-inflected suspicion of self-indulgent privilege. A man who “can’t count” is a man who refuses to measure consequences: the way youth becomes currency, the way marriage can function as a purchase disguised as romance, the way time turns into entitlement. In a culture that often treats a young wife as a trophy and an older husband as merely “still vital,” Gorky insists on the embarrassment of basic math. It’s a deliberately unglamorous metric for a decision people prefer to frame as fate.
Context matters: Gorky wrote in a Russia convulsing with modernization, where traditional institutions (marriage included) were being interrogated alongside class and authority. His fiction is crowded with people damaged by systems and by their own evasions. This aphorism is compact social criticism: count, or you’ll mistake domination for devotion and call it love.
The line also carries Gorky’s class-inflected suspicion of self-indulgent privilege. A man who “can’t count” is a man who refuses to measure consequences: the way youth becomes currency, the way marriage can function as a purchase disguised as romance, the way time turns into entitlement. In a culture that often treats a young wife as a trophy and an older husband as merely “still vital,” Gorky insists on the embarrassment of basic math. It’s a deliberately unglamorous metric for a decision people prefer to frame as fate.
Context matters: Gorky wrote in a Russia convulsing with modernization, where traditional institutions (marriage included) were being interrogated alongside class and authority. His fiction is crowded with people damaged by systems and by their own evasions. This aphorism is compact social criticism: count, or you’ll mistake domination for devotion and call it love.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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