We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on how we perceive continuity in life and only recognize its breaks and changes retrospectively.
Teju Cole's quote suggests that our experience of life feels seamless, but upon reflection, we can identify moments of discontinuity that punctuate our existence. These moments are often people or events that arise against a backdrop of what is otherwise an empty space, highlighting the significance of memories and experiences that shape our understanding of the past.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of reflecting on our life experiences.
The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
Hal, if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face, call me horse.
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Brief is this existence, as a visit in a strange house. The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.
Yes, thou art ever present, power divine; not circumscribed by time, nor fixed by space, confined to altars, nor to temples bound. In wealth, in want, in freedom, or in chains, in dungeons or on thrones, the faithful find thee.
Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.
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