What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle between reality and the subconscious, conveying how fearful thoughts can haunt us at night.
Cormac McCarthy's quote illustrates the inner turmoil that can arise when experiences or fears from reality seep into our dreams. It highlights the deep-seated anxieties that can manifest during the night, emphasizing the psychological effects of unresolved issues and the haunting nature of our fears, which can be more pronounced in the darkness of night when one's mind lacks distraction.
In practice
During a discussion about mental health, one might say, 'As Cormac McCarthy noted, what he could bear in the waking world he could not by night...'
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.
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.
He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.
I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
Sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge⦠There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good.
The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable. .. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both.
Do you honestly believe God likes you, not just loves you because theologically God has to love you?
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