# The Age of Innocence Tags: #literature ## Metadata * Author: [Edith Wharton](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B0B1Q2F17F * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1Q2F17F * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F) Why am I (re)reading this? Something about The Age of Innocence has resonated with me for a long time. I think my first exposure to Wharton was reading Ethan Frome in high school, a million years ago. I barely remember the plot — just vague outlines of a sad unfulfilled marriage and a vivacious young thing that the husband years for. I’m not sure if Wharton’s writing made enough of an impact on me to look up her other works at at the time. I do remember being re-introduced to The Age of Innocence when the characters in Gossip Girl were putting on a production of it. I think I then watched the gorgeous film produced by Scorsese - Daniel Day Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder is such a treat. Then I read the novel. And now many years later I am reading the novel again. I have always been intrigued by sad marriages, star crossed lovers, and doomed relationships. I think the underlying question that intrigues me here is: can there not be passion where there is duty? This part at the end of book 1, where Newland is finally confessing his feelings to Ellen and begging her to reciprocate, to let him break off the engagement with May so they can ride off into the sun together, when Ellen suddenly receives a telegram, reads it, wordlessly hands it to Newland, and Newland finds that he’s about to get what he’s been begging the Wellands for, and is to be married in a month - hits like a punch to the gut. There will be no riding into the sunset. ## Highlights It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it. — location: [20](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=20) ^ref-19184 --- He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation. — location: [27](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=27) ^ref-57059 --- "Yes, you have been away a very long time." "Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that I'm sure I'm dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;" which, for reasons he could not define, struck Newland Archer as an even more disrespectful way of describing New York society. — location: [196](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=196) ^ref-47713 --- With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul's custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas. — location: [522](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=522) ^ref-42418 --- 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, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, 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 judgment, 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. — location: [533](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=533) ^ref-18592 --- 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. — location: [558](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=558) ^ref-1606 --- The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes. — location: [773](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=773) ^ref-30056 --- What would she think if she found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady's fireside? — location: [878](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=878) ^ref-5393 --- Archer felt more curious than mortified. The atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure. — location: [881](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=881) ^ref-60064 --- As he went out into the wintry night, New York again became vast and imminent, and May Welland the loveliest woman in it. He turned into his florist's to send her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley which, to his confusion, he found he had forgotten that morning. — location: [1003](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1003) ^ref-24074 --- A great wave of compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate. — location: [1225](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1225) ^ref-8548 --- The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied. In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. — location: [1234](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1234) ^ref-6556 --- "When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had carriages. It was perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't tell, and I prefer not to try." — location: [1310](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1310) ^ref-17301 --- He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate. — location: [1462](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1462) ^ref-29476 --- beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism. — location: [1603](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1603) ^ref-30832 --- In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life. — location: [1626](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1626) ^ref-49071 --- none of these young men had much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was already perceptibly spreading. It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too. — location: [1632](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1632) ^ref-45159 --- at this opening Madame Olenska twisted the talk away to 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. This struck from all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the telephone carried them safely back to the big house. — location: [1763](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=1763) ^ref-17470 --- "That she ought to go back? I would rather see her dead!" cried the young man violently. "Ah," the Marchioness murmured, without visible resentment. For a while she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory fan between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and listened. "Here she comes," she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to the bouquet on the sofa: "Am I to understand that you prefer THAT, Mr. Archer? After all, marriage is marriage ... and my niece is still a wife..." — location: [2103](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=2103) ^ref-55032 --- "Yes—I—no: yes, it was beautiful," he said, looking at her blindly, and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards. — location: [2442](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=2442) ^ref-32579 --- he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep. — location: [2629](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=2629) ^ref-20880 --- The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts. — location: [2677](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=2677) ^ref-65286 --- The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with the soul behind it: — location: [3148](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=3148) ^ref-38544 --- They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. He must do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it. "Don't—don't be unhappy," she said, with a break in her voice, as she drew her hands away; and he answered: "You won't go back—you won't go back?" as if it were the one possibility he could not bear. — location: [3172](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=3172) ^ref-2443 --- if she should finally decide on returning to Europe—returning to her husband—it would not be because her old life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. No: she would go only if she felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a temptation to fall away from the standard they had both set up. Her choice would be to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded. — location: [3194](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B0B1Q2F17F&location=3194) ^ref-29939 ---