Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.
Interpretation
The essence of actions is recognized and defined by the witness or observer.
Cormac McCarthy's quote emphasizes the fundamental role of the witness in giving meaning to actions. Without someone to observe or interpret those actions, they lack significance, suggesting that our understanding of reality is heavily reliant on perception and interpretation. The act itself may hold no intrinsic value if there is no one to witness it, indicating the importance of perspective in shaping our realities.
In practice
In a discussion on the importance of perspective in storytelling.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Justice is the most important thing. In a plural society like Malaysia, you cannot have two laws - one law for the Muslim, one law for the non-Muslim.
A box is more a coffin for the human spirit than an inspiration.
You run and you run to catch up to the sun but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again.
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.
The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.
Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.
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