Time & Perspective Quote by Anatole Broyard

Broyard punctures the tidy, movie-ready arc we smuggle into our own biographies. “Epic implications” is a deliberately inflated phrase, a little self-mocking: he names the grand narrative hunger most people carry, then deflates it with the quiet insult of reality. We’re raised on beginnings (origin myths, childhood photographs, first chapters) and coached to expect an “appropriate end” (closure, meaning, a moral). What we actually get, he suggests, is the long, unphotogenic stretch where nothing resolves and everything continues.

The line “mostly middles” lands because it’s both formal and existential. Formally, it’s a structural critique: stories are engineered to move, but life is engineered to persist. Existentially, it’s an argument against the consolations of plot. Middles are where character is supposed to develop, but they’re also where readers get impatient. Broyard implies we live in the very section we would skim if it were a novel: repetition, maintenance, deferred decisions, background anxiety.

As a critic, Broyard is also critiquing criticism - the tendency to impose narrative coherence after the fact. The “appropriate end” reads like a jab at tasteful interpretations of a life, the kind that retrofit purpose onto messy days. Context matters: Broyard wrote with unusual intensity about illness and mortality late in life, and this sounds like someone refusing the sentimental script. Not despair, exactly; more like a demand that we stop treating living as mere setup for meaning, and start paying attention to the present tense where we actually reside.