Aging & Wisdom Quote by Olive Schreiner

Schreiner stages love as a contested civic project: something institutions either extirpate or cultivate, depending on what kind of society they’re trying to build. The monks and the poets aren’t just literary props; they represent rival regimes of meaning. Monastic discipline treats love as a destabilizing force, a leak in the wall between the self and the world. Poetry treats it as a necessary disorder, the one chaos worth tending. By granting both sides a tentative “perhaps,” Schreiner refuses easy moral sorting. She’s not picking a camp so much as exposing the price each camp pays.

The “blood-red flower” is doing double duty. It’s lush, alive, and unmistakably bodily; it’s also stained with transgression, “the color of sin,” which collapses Victorian sexual panic into a single visual. Schreiner’s brilliance is that she doesn’t sanitize the erotic to make it respectable. She keeps the red. The move that flips the entire passage is the final clause: “always the scent of a god.” Love may look like sin from the outside, but it carries a trace of the sacred that can’t be legislated away. Scent is an inspired choice: intangible, involuntary, impossible to argue with. You can shut your eyes to the flower; you can’t quite stop breathing.

In Schreiner’s late-19th-century context, this is quietly insurgent. A woman writer, skeptical of inherited pieties, reframes desire not as a moral failure but as a mixed element of human life: dangerous, holy-adjacent, and therefore too complex for either ascetic purges or sentimental hymns.