Aging & Wisdom Quote by Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis takes a tidy swing at the comforting stories we tell ourselves about getting old. The line has the flat, almost impatient cadence of someone who’s heard too many speeches about “golden years” and too many poems dressing decline up as wisdom. “Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it” is a roll call of professional varnishers: artists, persuaders, and moral authorities whose job is to make hard facts feel meaningful. Lewis isn’t denying that meaning exists; he’s puncturing the expectation that language can alchemize biology.

The intent is bracingly anti-sentimental. “Old age is still old age” lands like a verdict, insisting that no amount of eloquence can negotiate with the body’s limits: fatigue, illness, shrinking options, the quiet humiliations no proverb fixes. It’s also a sly jab at cultural performance. We praise elders, we quote them, we stage them as repositories of perspective; then we recoil from the actual realities of aging when they’re inconvenient, costly, or unglamorous. Lewis calls that bluff by stripping the subject down to its plainest name.

Context matters because Lewis wrote in an America drunk on uplift and self-improvement, where every phase of life was being sold as a product or a moral lesson. His realism often targets boosterism and the rhetoric of progress. Here, he’s applying that same skepticism inward, toward time itself: not everything is redeemable by framing. Some things just are, and the honesty stings because it’s true.