Life & Wisdom Quote by Conrad Aiken

Loneliness is the meter here, not the theme. Aiken doesn’t romanticize isolation; he stamps it like a fact on a birth certificate. “Separate we come, and separate we go” has the blunt symmetry of a funeral bell: entry and exit are matched, and everything in the middle starts to look like a brief, improvisational truce. The line’s power is its refusal to flatter the reader with cosmic reassurance. No talk of destinies braided together, no comforting metaphysics. Just the hard grammar of “we” trying to stand together while announcing separateness as the default condition.

Then he tightens the vise: “And this be it known, is all that we know.” That mock-formal, almost biblical phrasing (“be it known”) reads like a proclamation from a lectern, but what it delivers is anti-revelation. The authority of the voice undercuts itself; the sentence performs certainty while confessing epistemic poverty. It’s a neat modernist move: build a grand rhetorical stage, then admit there’s no final script.

Context matters. Aiken, writing in the shadow of early 20th-century disillusionment, is part of the generation that watched old certainties hemorrhage meaning - religion, progress narratives, even the promise that interior life can be cleanly communicated. The subtext isn’t “relationships don’t matter,” but “connection is real and still insufficient.” We touch, we translate, we miss. The quote lands because it treats that gap not as tragedy to solve, but as the one reliable datum we can carry from cradle to grave.