Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the consequences of confronting harsh realities, suggesting that too much awareness can lead to a breakdown of one's rationality.
In this quote, Angela Carter illustrates how Drosselmeier's encounter with the overwhelming truths of life has resulted in a loss of his sanity. This serves as a commentary on how the perception of reality can be burdensome and, at times, devastating to the human mind, leading one to a state of confusion or madness.
In practice
In a discussion about the burdens of truth, one might say, 'As Angela Carter once said, reality can sometimes overwhelm you.'
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.
The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.
One of the signs that you may not grasp the unique, radical nature of the gospel is that you are certain that you do.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
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