What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.
Interpretation
The quote explores the intrinsic power of language and its ability to evoke deep, often painful emotions that cannot be extinguished by physical ailments.
Anne Carson's quote delves into the profound relationship between language and our inner fears, suggesting that the essence of language holds a unique capacity to express and amplify our vulnerabilities. The phrase 'no accident of the body' implies that while physical circumstances can affect us, the emotional and psychological impact of language remains a powerful force, capable of 'burning' with intensity regardless of one's physical state.
In practice
A public speaker may use this quote to emphasize the importance of language in communicating profound truths about human experience.
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. Itβs usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.
You lose your individuality a huge amount when you have no money, and I certainly had that experience.
Where there is injury let me sow pardon.
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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