The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
Interpretation
Grief can create strong connections between people who share similar losses.
This quote emphasizes that the relationships forged through shared experiences of grief are some of the most profound. It suggests that in times of sorrow, individuals come together in a meaningful way, creating a sense of community and understanding that transcends ordinary bonds.
In practice
In a eulogy, one might highlight how shared grief can unite friends and family.
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.
Empathy fuels connection; sympathy drives disconnection.
If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
Your only real choices are to open fully and receive their gifts or crucify them and be relieved of their force...But you must be willing to feel your heart's terrors and wounds or else you will close and protect yourself, striking back at the source of openness you most yearn to become.
The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either -- or both -- when needed?
- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
Losing Bogey was horrible, obviously. Because he was young. And because he gave me my life. I wouldn't have had a - I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't met him. I would have had a completely different kind of life. He changed me, he gave me everything. And he was an extraordinary man.
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