Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Adams

Adams gives aging a meteorology that feels both honest and faintly accusatory. “Indian Summer” is the season that shouldn’t exist, a late flare of warmth after the script says cold is coming. By borrowing that image, he rejects the two standard narratives of later life: decline as pure bleakness or “golden years” as forced cheer. His prescription is tonal, not logistical: “a little sunny and a little sad.” The sadness isn’t a flaw to be managed away; it’s part of the color palette that makes the light look like something earned rather than staged.

The line that does the most cultural work is “infinite in wealth and depth of tone.” A historian’s ear is showing. Adams isn’t asking for more events, more productivity, more novelty; he’s asking for resonance, for the ability to feel layers in what remains. That’s a patrician ideal of maturity: less accumulation, more refinement, the mind turning from conquest to interpretation.

Then comes the barb: “but never hustled.” Written by a man who watched the United States lurch into industrial modernity, it reads like a rebuke to the emerging religion of speed. “Hustled” is almost slangy here, deliberately plain against the painterly “depth of tone.” It frames busyness as vulgar pressure applied from the outside, incompatible with late-life dignity. Adams is arguing that the final stretch shouldn’t be optimized; it should be inhabited.