"Time stays, we go"
About this Quote
Mencken’s four-word gut punch works because it flips the sentimental script people like to tell themselves about aging. We talk as if time is the thing that “passes,” like a train pulling out of the station. Mencken, a professional skeptic with a talent for puncturing civic pieties, reverses the metaphor: time is the platform. We’re the ones boarding and disappearing.
The intent is partly philosophical, partly needling. By stripping the idea down to a blunt, almost grammatical inevitability, he denies the reader any comforting narrative arc. No moral lesson, no promise of progress, no hand on the shoulder. Just a cold inventory of who moves and who doesn’t. That’s classic Mencken: the cynicism isn’t decorative; it’s the point. If you can’t flatter yourself that “time will heal” or “history bends,” you have to confront the simpler truth that the universe isn’t participating in your drama.
The subtext is a critique of human self-importance. “Time stays” implies permanence without personality: time doesn’t care, doesn’t judge, doesn’t hurry. “We go” is both literal (death) and social (generations replaced, reputations fading, movements becoming footnotes). In Mencken’s early-20th-century America - loud with boosterism, moral crusades, and faith in onward-and-upward modernity - that reversal lands like an anti-slogan. It’s not nihilism so much as an insult to our favorite illusion: that the world is tracking our schedule.
The intent is partly philosophical, partly needling. By stripping the idea down to a blunt, almost grammatical inevitability, he denies the reader any comforting narrative arc. No moral lesson, no promise of progress, no hand on the shoulder. Just a cold inventory of who moves and who doesn’t. That’s classic Mencken: the cynicism isn’t decorative; it’s the point. If you can’t flatter yourself that “time will heal” or “history bends,” you have to confront the simpler truth that the universe isn’t participating in your drama.
The subtext is a critique of human self-importance. “Time stays” implies permanence without personality: time doesn’t care, doesn’t judge, doesn’t hurry. “We go” is both literal (death) and social (generations replaced, reputations fading, movements becoming footnotes). In Mencken’s early-20th-century America - loud with boosterism, moral crusades, and faith in onward-and-upward modernity - that reversal lands like an anti-slogan. It’s not nihilism so much as an insult to our favorite illusion: that the world is tracking our schedule.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
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