Life & Wisdom Quote by Harold Brodkey

Sickness has a way of rearranging your ethics, and Brodkey admits it with a shopper's clarity: once illness arrives, he doesn’t reach for uplift or stoicism, he reaches for a premium screen. The line lands because it treats convalescence not as a spiritual test but as a logistical problem: you will be stuck, you will be frightened, you will need company, so at least make the company sharp, reliable, and paid for.

The kicker is “almost the first thing.” That phrasing confesses impulse while dressing it up as sensible planning. It suggests the mind’s panicked triage: before meaning, before legacy, before the brave face, there’s the immediate need to anesthetize time. A “truly good” television set isn’t just consumerism; it’s a controlled environment. Illness steals agency over your body, so you reclaim agency over your surroundings. If you can’t choose your prognosis, you can choose your pixels.

Context matters. Brodkey’s late work, especially his AIDS-era essays, is steeped in unsparing self-observation: the body becoming strange, the calendar turning predatory, the self oscillating between vanity and terror. Buying a good TV reads as both resignation and rebellion. Resignation, because he’s preparing for long hours of enforced passivity. Rebellion, because he refuses the culturally approved script where suffering must be edifying. He chooses comfort without apology, and the bluntness is the point: mortality doesn’t purify you; it exposes what you already want.