Life & Wisdom Quote by Harold Brodkey

"This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over" lands with the hushed force of someone listening to his own ending in real time. Brodkey isn’t just noting mortality; he’s inventorying the components that make a self legible: identity (the social story), mind (the private engine), and, most tellingly, "cast of speech" (the outward signature, the way a person sounds in the world). He stacks them like artifacts on a table and then delivers the blunt verdict: nearly over. The restraint is the point. No melodrama, no metaphysics. Just the intimate bureaucracy of dying.

The subtext is Brodkey’s lifelong obsession with consciousness as style. For him, speech isn’t decoration; it’s the body’s evidence, the last medium where personality insists on being specific. That’s why "particular" matters. He’s arguing against the smoothing effect of death narratives that turn people into symbols. He wants the reader to feel how extinction isn’t abstract but granular: a cadence disappearing, a vocabulary thinning, the self’s quirks going dark.

Context sharpens the line into something like reportage. In the late work associated with his AIDS illness, Brodkey wrote with unsettling clarity about bodily decline and the mind’s attempts to stay articulate inside it. "Nearly" is doing heavy lifting: a thin, stubborn margin of time where thought still occurs, where language still flickers. The sentence becomes a quiet protest against erasure and a final flex of authorial control: if the self is going to end, it will at least name the parts as they slip away.