Life & Wisdom Quote by William Dean Howells

Aging arrives here not as a milestone but as an unsolicited bureaucracy. Howells turns his impending sixty-nine into an “affair” he never agreed to join, a wry demotion of the grand Life-Event into something like a committee decision made without him. The line’s power is in that cool, almost legal phrasing: “I did not start,” “I have not been consulted.” It’s the language of civic complaint applied to the body, and that mismatch supplies the quiet comedy.

The subtext is less “I’m fine with getting old” than “why pretend I’m the author of this?” In a culture that loves to frame age as either triumph (wisdom!) or tragedy (decline!), Howells chooses a third posture: bemused non-ownership. “I do not seem to care” isn’t swagger; it’s detachment, the kind that comes when you’ve watched enough seasons of public opinion, literary fashion, and personal expectation roll through to recognize how little the self actually controls.

Context matters: Howells, a major realist of his era, built a career on puncturing melodrama and insisting on the everyday as worthy material. This sentence is realism distilled into a single shrug. It also hints at a modern, almost existential skepticism: the self as a passenger, not a driver, in the most intimate narrative we have. By refusing to romanticize aging, he makes room for something sharper - the complaint that life’s biggest transformations happen with no consent forms, no vote, and no appeal.