Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Impatience is an oddly unglamorous villain: no horns, no grand ideology, just the itchy conviction that the present is intolerable. Auden’s line works because it reframes “sin” not as a list of taboo acts but as a psychological tempo problem, a sabotaged relationship to time. In his telling, the Fall isn’t only about disobedience; it’s about rushing the ripening of knowledge, grabbing at consequence before we can bear it. Paradise becomes less a lost garden than a lost cadence.

The biblical allusion does double duty. “Driven out” suggests a forceful ejection, but Auden pins the motor to something internal: impatience is the engine that expels us. The sharper twist is the second clause: “because of impatience we cannot return.” That turns repentance into a matter of attention and endurance. We don’t fail to return because the gates are locked; we fail because we want the comfort, clarity, or absolution on demand. We want spiritual fast food.

Auden, writing in the wreckage-shadow of the 20th century, knew how modernity trains impatience: politics that promises instant purity, technology that sells frictionless living, ideologies that treat waiting as weakness. The subtext is a critique of shortcuts - moral, emotional, historical. Salvation, if it exists, requires the one thing our age least rewards: the capacity to stay with uncertainty without trying to outrun it.