Remembering Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky would have turned 80 in May, but anyone who knew him in the 1980s or ’90s would find it absurd to imagine him as an octogenarian. His robust presence, which commanded any room back then, was incompatible with the idea of his shrinking into doddering frailty. But Brodsky was both young and old. His energy, his probing mind, the rakish slant of his shoulders, his reach-for-the-rafters poetry readings—these qualities kept him ever clothed in the semblance of youth, a boy genius in secondhand jackets that looked as if they came off the rack wrinkled and ink stained, yet draping him like a monument. But he also seemed old. Watching him chain-smoke Kent III cigarettes, having first bitten off the filter, despite two bypass surgeries, made his death from a heart attack in 1996 at age 55 seem a terminus already ticketed. And long before ill health carved a certain tiredness around the eyes, he exuded the aura of someone who had lived more deeply than most, been through much more. His slate-blue peepers looked not only across rooms, but centuries.