Time & Perspective Quote by Harold Brodkey

Brodkey turns the coming-of-age story inside out and aims it at the body. “Adolescence in reverse” is a devastatingly precise metaphor: adolescence is already a state of confusion, a sudden awareness of time, sex, appetite, social stakes. He keeps the mystery, but swaps the horizon. Where youth feels like an awkward beginning you can outgrow, this “reverse” version is an ending you can’t metabolize. The line doesn’t ask for pity; it insists on a new grammar for late-life consciousness.

The engine here is probability. “Decay of the odds” makes mortality feel less like fate than like a shrinking statistical window, the way a gambler watches the house edge quietly swallow hope. It’s clinical language pressed into intimate service, a writer’s trick for making dread sound factual. That cool phrasing also suggests Brodkey’s distrust of sentimentality: he wants the reader to feel the terror through arithmetic, not violins.

Then he lands the knife: “that I can sleep it off.” Adolescence is full of temporary humiliations; you wake up and your skin clears, your heartbreak dulls, the world resets. Brodkey exposes the childish fantasy embedded in adulthood - the idea that the body’s crises are just bad nights. The subtext is a confrontation with terminal time, shaped by his public struggle with AIDS in the 1990s: illness as a second puberty, but without the promise of arrival. The intent is to make decay legible not as melodrama, but as lived, baffling transition - the last one.