Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Olson

Restlessness dressed up as reassurance: that's the sneaky engine in Olson's "We're all moving, moving, moving. Isn't it nice?" The line opens like a communal chant, almost cheery, but the repetition turns "moving" into a drumbeat. It doesn't just describe motion; it performs it, speeding the reader along until the question lands like a nervous laugh. "Isn't it nice?" reads less like gratitude than a forced smile in the middle of acceleration.

Olson, a postwar poet with a surveyor's obsession for space, measure, and breath, was writing in a culture newly hooked on velocity: highways, suburban drift, Cold War logistics, the sense that history itself had shifted into a higher gear. In his "projective verse" world, the poem isn't a polished object; it's energy transferred. This sentence is projective in miniature: the breath piles up, then breaks into a social nicety that reveals discomfort. The "we're all" matters. It's democratic and coercive at once, implying shared momentum while flattening individual choice. You're included whether you consent or not.

The subtext is a critique of progress-talk that mistakes motion for meaning. "Moving" can be migration, economic churn, ideological pivoting, even the mind's inability to stay still. Olson doesn't preach; he lets the chipper tag question expose the bargain: keep up, call it pleasant, don't ask where it's headed. The brilliance is how quickly the line shifts from collective euphoria to existential side-eye, a portrait of modern life as perpetual transit sold as a lifestyle perk.