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.
Interpretation
Words are powerful and rooted in deep history, yet we often overlook their significance.
Bruno Schulz reflects on the nature of language, suggesting that our everyday communication is intertwined with ancient narratives and histories. He warns us that in our modern world, we risk losing sight of the profound stories and meanings carried by words, as they are akin to the remnants of once-great art and civilization. This quote invites us to consider the depth and significance behind what we say and how we engage with language, urging us to appreciate the historical context that shapes our understanding.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature and language.
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 one’s 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.
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.
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.
They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
Aphrodite-Venus had become not a subject of adoration, but an agent of exploitation. From the moment Christian society perceived sex not as a gift of the goddess but a crime against God himself, women were believed to be the vessels of love's malign power.
I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?
If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it's utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.
When you cut into the present the future leaks out.
We may not live in the past, but the past lives in us.
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