The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the monotony and dissatisfaction of life, comparing stagnant days to stale bread.
In this quote, Bruno Schulz uses the metaphor of cold, stale bread to convey a sense of life that has become dull and uninspiring. The imagery of cutting through these hardened days with blunt knives suggests a struggle and lack of enthusiasm for life, indicating a deeper existential boredom where moments pass without joy or purpose.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming apathy in daily life, this quote from Bruno Schulz could highlight the dangers of letting days pass by without engagement.
Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.
An event may be small and insignificant in its origin , and yet, when drawn close to oneβs eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.
As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.
There are things than cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to loose their integrity in the frailty of realization.
And so you're afraid of the emptiness of your friend's life. But there's no emptiness in the life of a man of knowledge, I tell you. Everything is filled to the brim and everything is equal.
Empathy requires something extremely difficult: accepting the fact that we are not and never will be in the other person's shoes. There's no rational, universal course because individuals have different goals, different worldviews and different experiences.
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.
The world is a sacred vessel. It should not be meddled with. It should not be owned. If you try to meddle with it you will ruin it. If you try to own it you will lose it
we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
When there is in nature no fixed condition, how much less must there be in the life of a people, beings endowed with mobility and movement!
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