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.
I find it very difficult to think of mistakes; not that I don't make any but because I was brought up to look only at the good things in life ... As for what lost the most money, probably Virgin Cola. It is still No 1 in Bangladesh though.
All that hullabaloo about somebody's net worth is just stupid, and it's made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
February 1997 - National Prayer Breakfast in Washington attended by the President and the First Lady. "What is taking place in America," she said, "is a war against the child. And if we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another."
The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem.
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