Aging & Wisdom Quote by Malcolm Bradbury

Bradbury flips the sentimental script: innocence doesn’t belong to children; it’s the hard-won privilege of the elderly. The line works because it commits an elegant provocation, then smuggles in a diagnosis of modern moral vanity. We’re used to treating youth as purity and age as compromise. Bradbury insists the opposite: the young are where appetite, ambition, and cruelty are most kinetically alive, while the old, having spent decades watching desire disappoint itself, can seem oddly untemptable.

The Victorian and Christian references aren’t nostalgia; they’re props in a satire about moral accounting. Victorian culture publicly fetishized purity while privately obsessed over vice, and Christianity’s “original sin” frames corruption as default, not accident. Bradbury’s twist - “a property of the young” - recasts sin as social energy: the young have consequences to manufacture, reputations to build, bodies that insist. “Innocent” here doesn’t mean virtuous; it means no longer strategically dangerous. The old “grow beyond corruption” because corruption requires leverage: status to chase, sex to trade, careers to hustle, futures to protect.

Subtext: modern culture romanticizes youth partly to excuse it. If the young are naturally innocent, their damage reads as error, not choice. Bradbury rejects that alibi. He also needles the liberal fantasy that experience automatically makes us better. Experience can just make us tired - and tiredness, in this framing, passes for grace.

Context matters: as a late-20th-century British novelist steeped in institutional satire, Bradbury is aiming at the moral theatrics of societies that preach innocence while rewarding ambition. The joke lands because it’s mean, and because it’s uncomfortably plausible.