Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Interpretation
Life is a continuous struggle where the challenges often stem from varying levels of difficulty rather than a simple dichotomy of good versus bad.
In this quote, Joseph Brodsky reflects on the nature of life as a perpetual battle. He suggests that the conflicts we face are not simply about making moral choices between good and bad but rather navigating through a multitude of hardships, where the reality often presents us with worse options rather than easy distinctions between right and wrong. This perspective encourages us to embrace the complexity of our experiences and recognize that lifeβs challenges are nuanced and require critical thinking.
In practice
When giving a motivational speech about resilience, this quote can highlight the complexities of life's challenges.
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
I shall strive not to be guilty of adding any fuel to the flames of hatred and passion which, if continued to be fed, promise to burn up whatever is left by the war of decent human feeling in Europe.
The past is a trail you leave behind, much like the wake of a speedboat. That is, it's a vanishing trail temporarily showing you where you were. The wake of a boat doesn't affect it's course-obviously it can't since it appears behind the boat. So consider this image when you exclaim that your past is the reason you aren't moving forward.
Paradise is at your own center; unless you find it there, there is no way to enter.
In this life struggle, here I am among you fully cognizant that a true believer has no fear of what God has ordained for him. Those who are visited by fear live only for their present, under the illusion that the world began with them and will end with their departure.
The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
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