Aging & Wisdom Quote by Aphra Behn

One hour. Not a lifetime, not a marriage contract, not the dutiful slow-cook of respectability: one hour, fully spent. Aphra Behn is doing something quietly incendiary here, and the fuse is the phrase "right-down love" - blunt, unvarnished, anti-poetic in its insistence on the physical. In a culture that loved to dress desire in allegory, she yanks the curtain back and measures value in heat, not decorum.

The line’s gamble is moral arithmetic. "Worth an age" turns pleasure into a kind of economic fact, a ledger entry that mocks the era’s dominant bargain: endure the dullness, earn the virtue. Behn flips it. Dull living isn’t morally superior; it’s just slow. The subtext is that respectable life can be its own form of vice, a prolonged dishonesty performed for social approval.

Context sharpens the provocation. Behn was a Restoration dramatist - writing in a moment when the theater reopened, cynicism went mainstream, and sexual politics became public entertainment. But she’s also a working woman in a world that treated women’s desire as either a joke or a threat. So the line doubles as self-defense: if women are going to be policed for wanting, Behn insists on wanting something worth the risk.

What makes it work is its compression. It doesn’t argue for hedonism; it declares a standard. One vivid hour becomes a rebuke to every life lived as a waiting room.