Time & Perspective Quote by Harold Brodkey

Defiance is doing the emotional math and still choosing the wound. Brodkey, speaking late in life and in the shadow of AIDS, rejects the conversion narrative people hunger for: the tidy arc where suffering “teaches,” then grants absolution, then earns a clean bill of moral health. He won’t offer that kind of consolation. “I can’t change the past, and I don’t think I would” isn’t just stoicism; it’s an author insisting that biography, with all its damage and appetite, is also his raw material. To wish it away would be to falsify the work.

The line about not expecting to be understood is equally barbed. Brodkey had a reputation for difficulty and self-mythmaking, for prose that refuses easy access. Here he frames misunderstanding not as tragedy but as a cost he’s already built into his identity. It’s a preemptive refusal of the public’s bargain: we will forgive you if you become legible, if you summarize yourself into a lesson.

Then the hard kernel: he would not trade his writing for a cure. That’s not romantic “art above life” posturing so much as an indictment of the way illness invites spectators to demand repentance. Brodkey suggests that the stories and novels are not ornaments on a life; they are the life as he can justify it. In the AIDS era, when bodies were politicized and narratives policed, he chooses authorship over purity. The subtext is brutal: if redemption requires erasing the record, it’s not redemption, it’s censorship.