Aging & Wisdom Quote by Sherwood Anderson

Anderson smuggles a folk-myth cosmology into a modernist critique of certainty: truth isn’t discovered like a buried artifact, it’s fabricated like a tool. The opening, almost biblical cadence ("in the beginning") sets you up for a creation story, then flips the expected payoff. Instead of light, law, or moral order, you get mental clutter: "a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth". It’s a demotion of truth from divine property to human handiwork, which is exactly Anderson’s wider project as a writer obsessed with interior lives and the private, half-formed impulses people mistake for solid principles.

The key move is "composite". Anderson frames truth not as a single clear perception but as an accretion - vague thoughts pressed together until they harden into something socially usable. That’s both democratizing and suspicious. Democratizing because everyone participates; suspicious because composites can be arbitrary, patched from fear, desire, and convenience. He’s quietly warning that our "truths" are as messy as we are, and that the authority we grant them is retroactive: we make them, then pretend they were always there.

Then comes the startling aesthetic judgment: "they were all beautiful". Anderson isn’t endorsing relativism as a shrug; he’s diagnosing why people cling to their truths even when they’re flimsy. Truths become art objects - narratives that comfort, organize, and give shape to chaos. The subtext is cultural: societies don’t just argue over facts, they compete over stories that feel coherent. Anderson’s sweetness here is strategic, not naive; he understands that beauty can be a sedative, making invented certainties feel inevitable.