Less Than One Quotes

“The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination...”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin — not even by a minority.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: “Hi, I’m Evil!” That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“Mandelstam was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“A rhyme turns an idea into a law; and, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“Love as content is in the habit of limiting formal patterns. The same goes for faith. After all, there are only so many adequate manifestations for truly strong sentiments; which, in the end, is what explains rituals.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man’s point of view, though, it’s all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.
Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation’s resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“The meaning of these lines is anything but passive for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“A word’s fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its usage.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“Nothing reveals a poet's weakness like classical verse, and that's why it's so universally dodged.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“Throughout one’s life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca. Its vocabulary absorbs all the other tongues, and its utterance gratifies a subject, however inanimate it may be. Also, by being thus uttered, a subject acquires an ecclesiastical, almost sacred denomination, echoing both the way we perceive the objects of our passions and the Good Book’s suggestion as to what God is. Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry. Akhmatova’s”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“I must admit that I feel somewhat uneasy talking about these things: because turning or not turning that other cheek is, after all, an extremely intimate affair. The encounter always occurs on a one-to-one basis. It’s always your skin, your coat and cloak, and it is your limbs that will have to do the walking. To advise, let alone to urge, anyone about the use of these properties is, if not entirely wrong, indecent. All I aspire to do here is to erase from your minds a cliché that harmed so many and yielded so little. I also would like to instill in you the idea that as long as you have your skin, coat, cloak, and limbs, you are not yet defeated, whatever the odds are.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, the common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is justified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evil; that moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays

“I guess there was always some ‘’me’’ inside that small and, later, somewhat bigger shell around which ‘’everything’’ was happening. Inside that shell the entity which one calls ‘’I’’ never changed and never stopped watching what was going on outside. I am not saying to hint at pearls inside. What I am saying is that the passage of time does not much affect that entity. To get a low grade, to operate a milling machine, to be beaten up at an interrogation, or to lecture on Callimachus in a classroom is essentially the same. This is what makes one feel astonished when one grows up and finds oneself tackling the tasks that are supposed to be handled by grownups. The dissatisfaction of a child with his parents control over him and the panic of an adult confronting a responsibility are of the same nature. One is neither of these figures ; one is perhaps less than ‘’one’’.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays