Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the urgency of how we conduct ourselves in the face of life's challenges and inevitable mortality.
Raymond Carverβs quote addresses the significant human experience of life and death, highlighting the pressing nature of our choices and behavior in a transient world. It reflects an awareness of mortality and the need to act meaningfully as time diminishes and external circumstances become increasingly challenging, akin to rising water threatening our existence.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing life, one might use this quote to inspire action amidst adversity.
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a minute. Then looked out the window at the rain. And gave over. Put myself entirely in the keep of this rainy morning. Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgivable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.
It's strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.
When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.
I had a friend who worked at a hospice, and he said people in their final moments don't discuss their successes, awards or what books they wrote or what they accomplished. They only talk about their loves and their regrets, and I think that's very telling.
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it's been.
Rapidly, merrily, Life's sunny hours flit by, Gratefully, cheerily Enjoy them as they fly!
It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.
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