No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that losing innocence is a necessary part of life, and trying to reclaim that innocence is ultimately pointless.
Elizabeth Bowen's quote speaks to the inevitability of losing innocence as we grow and experience life. It suggests that once we have moved past the simplicity of our untainted views of the world, attempting to return to that state, symbolized by a 'picnic in Eden', becomes fruitless. This illustrates how personal growth often involves leaving behind a state of purity and how engaging with the complexities of life precludes a return to a simpler, more innocent time.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of adulthood, one might quote this to illustrate the inevitability of losing one's innocence.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
The chief problem about death ... is the fear that there may be no afterlife - a depressing thought.
Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life
What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?" "I don't know. My⦠my code of morals, perhaps." "Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?" "Comprehension.
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.
The Catechism was not written to please you. It will not make life easy for you, because it demands of you a new life.
Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.
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