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.
The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that.
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.
A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.
I loved every second of Catholic church. I loved the sickly sweet rotting-pomegranate smells of the incense. I loved the overwrought altar, the birdbath of holy water, the votive candles; I loved that there was a poor box, the stations of the cross rendered in stained glass on the windows.
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.
A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.
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