Aging & Wisdom Quote by Djuna Barnes

Barnes makes time sound less like a neutral measurement and more like an institutional force with minutes, agendas, and a grim deliverable. Calling it "a great conference" drags the end of life into the fluorescent-lit world of planning committees: slow, procedural, and inevitable. It’s a joke with teeth. Death isn’t a sudden gothic flourish; it’s the outcome of endless coordination, a calendar that keeps getting confirmed. The phrase "planning our end" turns mortality into bureaucracy, implying we’re never outside its scheduling, even when we feel most free.

The second clause is the real Barnes twist: "youth is only the past putting a leg forward". Youth, usually sold as pure beginning, gets reframed as an extension of what’s already happened. The past isn’t behind you; it’s advancing through you, wearing your body like a proxy. That image quietly sabotages the culture’s romance of youth as clean potential. Barnes suggests that what we call freshness is often repetition with better posture: inherited habits, family scripts, social expectations dressed up as possibility.

Context matters because Barnes, a modernist with a taste for the barbed aphorism, wrote in an era that watched old certainties collapse while new ones (medicine, industry, war) promised progress and delivered disillusion. Her line carries that modernist suspicion: the future isn’t a sunrise; it’s the past continuing, and time isn’t a river; it’s a meeting you didn’t agree to attend. The brilliance is the double deflation - of death’s drama and youth’s glamour - with a single, unsettling metaphor.