"Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity"
About this Quote
Porchia flips the usual nostalgia script: infancy isn’t just a stage we sentimentalize, it’s the only thing with staying power. Everything after is “brevity, extreme brevity” - not because life is literally short, but because consciousness accelerates. Once you acquire language, duties, self-image, the days stop being thick. Time becomes a thin, utilitarian medium you spend.
The line works because it treats “infancy” less as a biological period than as a mode of being: unarmored attention, raw dependence, a self not yet hardened into a narrative. Calling it “eternal” is a metaphysical provocation. The infant can’t remember, can’t plan, can’t curate meaning - so it sits outside the anxious bookkeeping that makes adulthood feel like it’s constantly running out. Eternity here isn’t endless duration; it’s the absence of a clock.
Porchia’s repetition - “the rest, all the rest” - sounds like someone brushing an entire lifetime off the table with one gesture. It’s severe, almost comic in its refusal to negotiate with the adult world. As an Argentine poet of aphoristic fragments, he wrote in an era when modernity promised speed and progress while delivering dislocation and inwardness. This sentence has the bite of that modern condition: we “grow up” into efficiency, and in doing so we trade the only time that felt infinite for schedules, memory, and fear of waste.
Under the tenderness is a threat: if infancy is eternal, adulthood might be the brief fever dream.
The line works because it treats “infancy” less as a biological period than as a mode of being: unarmored attention, raw dependence, a self not yet hardened into a narrative. Calling it “eternal” is a metaphysical provocation. The infant can’t remember, can’t plan, can’t curate meaning - so it sits outside the anxious bookkeeping that makes adulthood feel like it’s constantly running out. Eternity here isn’t endless duration; it’s the absence of a clock.
Porchia’s repetition - “the rest, all the rest” - sounds like someone brushing an entire lifetime off the table with one gesture. It’s severe, almost comic in its refusal to negotiate with the adult world. As an Argentine poet of aphoristic fragments, he wrote in an era when modernity promised speed and progress while delivering dislocation and inwardness. This sentence has the bite of that modern condition: we “grow up” into efficiency, and in doing so we trade the only time that felt infinite for schedules, memory, and fear of waste.
Under the tenderness is a threat: if infancy is eternal, adulthood might be the brief fever dream.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Antonio Porchia, Voces (1943). Aphorism often rendered in English as: "Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity." |
More Quotes by Antonio
Add to List
