Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the limitations of self-perception in understanding one's own life story.
Arthur Golden uses the metaphor of a rabbit to illustrate how individuals may struggle to objectively narrate their own experiences. Just as a rabbit cannot fully describe its surroundings while focused on hopping through the grass, people often have a limited perspective on their own lives, and therefore, storytelling about oneself can be incomplete. To truly understand someone's existence, one needs an external perspective that acknowledges the context and nuances of their environment.
In practice
A writer reflecting on their journey might use this quote to emphasize the difficulty of self-narration.
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.
An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
I must secure more time for private devotions. I have been living far too public for me. The shortening of devotions starves the soul, it grows lean and faint. I have been keeping too late hours.
What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.
You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to yin and yang. Yin and yang give birth to all things... The complete whole is the complete whole. So also is any part the complete whole... But forget about understanding and harmonizing and making all things one. The universe is already a harmonious oneness; just realize it.
Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say 'fascism' or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say 'no' because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in.
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