"He who goes step by step always finds himself level with a step"
About this Quote
Progress, Porchia implies, is less a heroic ascent than a trap you willingly rehearse. "He who goes step by step always finds himself level with a step" looks like a proverb you might needlepoint onto a pillow, until the syntax turns on you. The phrase "level with" cancels the romance of climbing. No matter how dutifully you advance, you end up merely aligned with the next increment, not above it. The reward for patience is another unit of patience.
That’s the intent: to puncture the bourgeois theology of steady improvement. Porchia’s aphorisms, written in early- to mid-20th-century Latin America and shaped by modernism’s skepticism, often operate like tiny philosophical grenades. Here he targets a common moral fantasy: that methodical, incremental living guarantees elevation - in status, virtue, enlightenment. His line says the method may be the cage. If your identity becomes "the one who proceeds step by step", you can mistake motion for meaning and obedience for arrival.
The subtext is harsher than it first appears. "Always" is the tell: there is no culmination, only continuity. The step is not a bridge; it’s the environment. Porchia’s wit is quiet but corrosive, the kind that doesn’t laugh so much as let you realize you’ve been laughing at yourself. He’s warning that the world’s sanctioned tempo - climb neatly, don’t skip, don’t leap - can keep you perpetually in training, perpetually almost there.
Read it as a critique of self-help before self-help existed: discipline without daring becomes a life spent congratulating yourself for being appropriately unfinished.
That’s the intent: to puncture the bourgeois theology of steady improvement. Porchia’s aphorisms, written in early- to mid-20th-century Latin America and shaped by modernism’s skepticism, often operate like tiny philosophical grenades. Here he targets a common moral fantasy: that methodical, incremental living guarantees elevation - in status, virtue, enlightenment. His line says the method may be the cage. If your identity becomes "the one who proceeds step by step", you can mistake motion for meaning and obedience for arrival.
The subtext is harsher than it first appears. "Always" is the tell: there is no culmination, only continuity. The step is not a bridge; it’s the environment. Porchia’s wit is quiet but corrosive, the kind that doesn’t laugh so much as let you realize you’ve been laughing at yourself. He’s warning that the world’s sanctioned tempo - climb neatly, don’t skip, don’t leap - can keep you perpetually in training, perpetually almost there.
Read it as a critique of self-help before self-help existed: discipline without daring becomes a life spent congratulating yourself for being appropriately unfinished.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
|---|
More Quotes by Antonio
Add to List
