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.
Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.
Learn to live without self concern. _x000D_ _x000D_ For this you must know your own true being as indomitable, fearless and ever victorious. _x000D_ _x000D_ Once you know with absolute certainty that nothing can trouble you but your own imagination, _x000D_ _x000D_ you come to disregard your desires and fears, concepts and ideas, and live by truth alone.
Statistics are easy to remove ourselves from. A story, you are implicated in, and you have to choose what side you are going to be on.
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
The concept of substitution lies at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.
Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.
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