Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the complexity and challenges that arise when we try to control our surroundings for our own comfort.
Cormac McCarthy's quote emphasizes that the human wish to mold reality to suit personal preferences often leads to complicated dilemmas and contradictions. It suggests that striving for convenience in life can create unexpected challenges and conflicts, illuminating the paradox of our desires and the nature of existence itself.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of modern life, one might use this quote to highlight how our attempts to simplify and control our surroundings can complicate things.
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.
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat.
Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?
War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.
I would sooner be holy than happy if the two things could be divorced. Were it possible for a man always to sorrow and yet to be pure, I would choose the sorrow if I might win the purity, for to be free from the power of sin, to be made to love holiness, is true happiness.
We humans are obsessed with lights...Perhaps it is our way of hurling the constellations back at the sky.
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