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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the tension between ownership and the inherent autonomy of life.
In this quote, McCarthy explores the complex relationship between authority and the natural world. The judge's assertion of ownership is challenged by the existence of independent life forms that thrive without his control, suggesting that true ownership is not just about possession but also acknowledges the interconnectedness and autonomy of existence.
In practice
During a debate on environmental ethics, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of respecting the autonomy of nature.
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.
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.
He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.
Birds rising in flight is a sign that the enemy is lying in ambush; when the wild animals are startled and flee he is trying to take you unaware.
The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.
There are plenty of laws to protect guys' money even in war time but there's nothing on the books says a man's life's his own.
It's a travesty that people have forced someone who is gay to have to make their case that they deserve the same basic rights...
What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.