Parenting & Family Quote by Cyril Connolly

Connolly’s image is cruelly accurate: language arrives from the day’s surf looking alive, wet with significance, and then dries out into something dull, brittle, faintly embarrassing. The beachcombing child is key. Words “today” aren’t just weakened; they’re souvenirs, carried home with sincere excitement, only to reveal they were never built to last. Connolly is taking aim at the modern news cycle and the writer’s own complicity in it: journalism and public talk fetishize freshness, but “fresh” is often another way of saying “perishable.”

The metaphor does more than complain about cliches. Shells and seaweed aren’t fake; they’re real objects whose beauty depends on context - the glisten is seawater, the ropey green is motion, salt, light. Once removed from the sea (the living situation that gave them sheen), they lose their charge. Connolly implies words behave similarly: their sparkle is borrowed from immediacy, from the moment’s urgency and collective attention. Strip that away and you’re left with husks - not lies, but remnants.

Written by a journalist who also worried about literary permanence, the line reads like self-indictment. “Today” is doing heavy work: it’s modernity’s pace, its mass circulation, its quick moral fervors and quick forgettings. The subtext is anxiety about saturation - too many words, too little staying power. Connolly isn’t nostalgic for silence; he’s warning that when language becomes disposable, thought follows it onto the sand.