# The Age Of Innocence By Edith Wharton, 1920 ★★★☆☆ First read in September 2022 --- An exquisite portrait of Old New York and the American Victorian Gilded Age. A pitch-perfect rendition of the male gaze and its female object. A gay book on the surface but a deeply sad read overall, looking at lives fully spent obeying sophisticated tribal codes of honour, etiquette, manners and mannerisms and myriad other inventions of “high society”. This book was another reminder of our very long past of self-repression that we we need to (if we want to) grow out of. And there are still so many present day societies on Earth under the tyranny of “code” variants that value abstractions over human suffering.  How is it that the “higher” a society is, the further it takes one from oneself? When will we be self-confident enough in our own abilities, as we get smarter, to stop constructing these artefacts to mark our “intellectual enlightenment”, these crutches, these whole worlds of symbols to lean on?  This “high society” of New York’s mega rich in the late 19th century doesn't seem that much different from modern day gangs, or the old Wild Wild West norms, or Sharia-ruled worlds. # Quotes "Singly they betrayed their inferiority; but grouped together they represented "New York," and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral. He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome and also rather bad form to strike out for himself." "he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were.." "..an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole. Pg 34 "Women ought to be free-as free as we are," he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences. Pg. 36 "==What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?==" "==What if they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other?== He reviewed his friends' marriages (-the supposedly happy ones-) and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. ==He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgement, which she had been carefully trained not to possess==; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.” ** "The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. ==She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against==; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the facts of life." "The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance." "She was straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at his jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken."  "But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile.  "And ==he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.==" Pg. 101 “Look at the career of the honest man in American politics! They don’t want us.’” “Who’s they? Why don’t you all get together and be they yourselves?”  Pg. 111 "How the world must have looked when information travelled at such slow speed. How society was structured and the rules of engagement by the constraints of the environment. How strange new inventions must look to the present and how obligatory to the future." “If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit nearer perfection I might have told all you this from town, instead of tramping after you through the snow” (...) “ah the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even - incredible dream! - from one town to another.” Pg 113 On being attracted by the familiar. We don’t want happiness, we want familiarity. We will choose the familiar evil to the unfamiliar good any time: “She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it: but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even though it were against her will.” Pg. 164 There were two references to Romania, one mentioning the "royal hunting areas in Transylvania" and this was the second one: "Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor-or a 'private' anything is almost as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest." * “Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? ==The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!==”