Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Brodsky

Brodsky is picking a fight with the modern fantasy that borders and bureaucracies are the deepest human realities. For a poet exiled by the Soviet state and remade in another tongue’s shadow, “more ancient and inevitable” lands as both historical claim and personal indictment: regimes can deport bodies; they can’t so easily deport syntax, idiom, the private archive of jokes and prayers people carry in their mouths.

The line works because it quietly flips the usual hierarchy. States posture as permanent - flags, anthems, maps in classrooms - but they’re relatively young contraptions, assembled, revised, collapsed. Language, by contrast, is portrayed as geological: it predates the paperwork and outlasts the slogans. “Inevitable” is the provocation. Brodsky isn’t saying a language is morally superior; he’s saying it’s structurally harder to dismantle. You can outlaw words, police accents, rename streets, yet the old sounds persist in kitchens, lullabies, and curses. The state needs enforcement; language reproduces itself.

There’s subtext here about loyalty. In the 20th century, especially under empires and totalitarian systems, allegiance was demanded as a civic religion. Brodsky suggests a rival faith: your first true citizenship is linguistic, not political. That’s why poets are dangerous to states and indispensable to cultures. A state can conscript; language conscripts back, shaping what its citizens can imagine, remember, and refuse.