Time & Perspective Quote by Harold Brodkey

Brodkey turns consciousness into an action scene: "velocity of the moments" doesn’t just mean time passes quickly, it means it has force. You can feel the sentence accelerating, stacking clauses the way attention stacks sensations when you suddenly notice yourself living. The phrasing is deliberately cerebral - "entering that part of my head alert" - as if awareness is a room you step into, a posture you adopt, not a mood that happens to you. That self-scrutiny is quintessential Brodkey: intimacy rendered through the microscope of intellect.

The subtext is a quiet argument against the American hunger for the clean, the finished, the fixed. By insisting life was "never perfect, never absolute", he’s not confessing disappointment; he’s stripping perfection of its authority. The repetition lands like a verdict. "Never" doesn’t mourn; it clarifies. In that clarity, he finds a surprising emotional payoff: contentment, even fearlessness. Not because the world becomes kinder, but because the demand that it be complete evaporates. If absolutes are a mirage, failure and incompleteness stop being personal indictments.

Context matters: Brodkey’s work often circles illness, mortality, and the terror of being fully seen. Read against that, this is less a soothing aphorism than a hard-won technique - attention as survival. He’s describing a mental gearshift where accepting flux doesn’t diminish life; it makes it livable, because you stop bargaining with time and start moving with it.