"My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs"
About this Quote
Brandes slides a knife in with a smile: a childlike memory that suddenly turns into a critique of how adults narrate their own decline. The first sentence is intimate and disarming, almost pastoral: father, grass, the simple physics of speed. Then the tone pivots. “But it was astonishing how slow old people were” isn’t just observational; it’s Brandes testing the limits of reverence. In a culture that treats age as automatic authority, he notices the body’s betrayal with a frankness that borders on impolite.
The comedy is in the mislabeling. “Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs.” That phrase “called it” does the real work: it exposes language as a cosmetic. The hill becomes “stairs” so failure can masquerade as effort, limitation can pass for intention. Brandes, the critic, is already in formation here, diagnosing how people reframe reality to protect status and self-respect. He’s less interested in old age as tragedy than in the little rhetorical tricks we use to keep our narratives coherent.
Context matters: Brandes made a career out of puncturing inherited pieties and insisting on modern honesty. This reads like an early training exercise in that method. He sets up an adored figure (the father) as genuinely exceptional, then refuses to extend that halo to “old people” as a category. The subtext is ruthless: respect should be earned, not assumed; and when performance fails, people reach for metaphors to avoid saying the plain thing.
The comedy is in the mislabeling. “Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs.” That phrase “called it” does the real work: it exposes language as a cosmetic. The hill becomes “stairs” so failure can masquerade as effort, limitation can pass for intention. Brandes, the critic, is already in formation here, diagnosing how people reframe reality to protect status and self-respect. He’s less interested in old age as tragedy than in the little rhetorical tricks we use to keep our narratives coherent.
Context matters: Brandes made a career out of puncturing inherited pieties and insisting on modern honesty. This reads like an early training exercise in that method. He sets up an adored figure (the father) as genuinely exceptional, then refuses to extend that halo to “old people” as a category. The subtext is ruthless: respect should be earned, not assumed; and when performance fails, people reach for metaphors to avoid saying the plain thing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Father |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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