Life & Mortality Quote by Harold Brodkey

Brodkey turns grief into a kind of impossible tourism: you can show up, you can look, but you cannot actually inhabit the event as the person it’s about. “Like visiting one’s funeral” is a deliberately perverse simile, not because it’s shocking, but because it exposes the fantasy baked into so much mourning and self-mythmaking: the desire to witness your own erasure and still remain intact enough to take notes. The line’s power comes from how quickly it denies that fantasy. This “wild darkness” isn’t just death-as-mystery; it’s death as a zone where identity fails.

The subtext is Brodkey’s lifelong obsession with consciousness under pressure. His work often circles the mind’s stubborn, lyrical refusal to accept its own limits, especially around sex, family, illness, and mortality. Here, the sentence performs that refusal and its collapse at once. The repetition of “visiting” makes loss sound like a place, an institution, a formal appointment. Then the syntax tightens: “not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.” The gut-punch isn’t the unknown; it’s the eviction from the self. He’s arguing that the most monumental loss is not merely what’s gone, but the impossibility of being the “I” who could understand it.

Contextually, Brodkey wrote with an acute awareness of death’s bureaucracy and theater, especially late in life as AIDS restructured private suffering into public narrative. The line resists consolation. It’s an indictment of our cultural scripts for dying: you don’t get to attend your ending as a coherent protagonist.