It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.
Interpretation
Neglecting good manners signals a decline in social values and respect.
Cormac McCarthy's quote suggests that the erosion of good manners is a precursor to greater societal decay. The use of terms like 'Sir' and 'Ma'am' reflects respect and civility; their abandonment indicates a troubling shift in human interactions and the eventual consequences that follow.
In practice
In a discussion about societal changes, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of maintaining good manners.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Time present and time past / are both perhaps present in time future.
It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose.
You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
We were put here as witnesses to the miracle of life. We see the stars, and we want them. We are beholden to give back to the universe. If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal.
I've tried them all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.
Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
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