Time & Perspective Quote by Anatole Broyard

History, in Broyard's line, isn’t a home you build in; it’s a place you pass through with a camera and a map you barely understand. Calling us "tourists" is a quiet insult disguised as a shrug. Tourists consume sites, miss the language, misread the customs, then leave with souvenirs that feel like understanding. That’s his dig at the way individuals and nations narrate their own eras: we experience events up close but comprehend them at a distance, once the brochure has been printed.

The second clause lands like a bitter punchline. Wars are sold as moral clarifications, as engines of meaning and victory. Broyard says the only reliable "winnings" are irony: unintended consequences, reversed roles, the gap between what leaders promise and what history records. Irony is the historian’s currency because it’s what remains after the banners rot - the tragicomic mismatch between intention and outcome.

As a critic, Broyard is also winking at his own trade. Criticism is tourism with better sentences: you enter a world (a novel, a moment, a public tragedy), point at what others overlook, and admit you weren’t built for permanence there. The subtext is humility with teeth. People crave narrative mastery, especially after catastrophe; Broyard offers a colder comfort. You don’t get to own history, and if you insist on calling violence a path to meaning, history will answer by making you look foolish.