“The man is broken.
It’s a strange turn of phrase, now that I come to think about it.
It’s one of those quirks of English, the kind of quiet inexplicable oddity you might not pick up on unless it was the second - or in my case, the third - language you learned.
When we say, “He was attacked,” or, “he was spoken to,” we understand that we’re speaking in the past tense of an attack or a conversation that only happened once.
People don’t stay attacked.
But when we say, “he was broken,” we might be speaking of the past, the singular act of being broken, and but also a present condition, and an inevitable future; a state of brokenness that is everywhere, and deeply felt, and unshakeable.”