Faith & Spirit Quote by Harold Brodkey

Memory is rendered here as both sacrament and nuisance: “so complete and clear or so evasive” swings between the seductive precision of recollection and its slippery refusal to cooperate. Brodkey’s move is to treat remembering not as a passive replay but as a practiced, exhausting act of attention. The insistence of “has to be ended, has to be put aside” reads less like healthy closure than like a hard-won discipline. Memory, in his telling, doesn’t naturally stop. You have to stop it.

The chapel image does heavy lifting. A chapel is private but public-facing, a place where you’re allowed to feel intensely inside a prescribed frame. By comparing memory to leaving a chapel, Brodkey suggests that the past becomes a kind of interior liturgy: you enter, you kneel, you repeat, you commune with what’s absent. Then you exit, because life requires motion, and because staying would turn devotion into obsession. “Bringing the prayer to an end in one’s head” is the key subtext: the real struggle isn’t walking out; it’s quieting the reverberation. The body can leave, but the mind keeps murmuring.

Contextually, Brodkey’s work is obsessed with consciousness, illness, sex, family, and the way private experience metastasizes into narrative. This line feels like an author’s instruction to himself: close the scene, stop worshiping the hurt, stop polishing the past into art. It also hints at guilt. Ending a prayer can feel like betrayal; ending memory can feel like abandoning the dead, the younger self, the moment that still claims you.