It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, dont it? Yes. It does. There's a lot of things look better at a distance. Yeah? I think so. I guess there are. The life you've lived, for one. Yeah. Maybe what of it you aint lived yet, too.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that perspectives can change over time, with distance providing clarity and beauty to past experiences.
Cormac McCarthy's quote reflects on the idea that distance, both physical and temporal, can transform our perception of life and experiences. When viewed from a distance, past events may appear more beautiful or meaningful than they seemed in the moment. This perspective may allow individuals to appreciate both what they have lived through and what lies ahead, highlighting the complexity and evolving nature of human experience.
In practice
During a graduation speech, a speaker might use this quote to illustrate the importance of reflecting on past experiences as they move forward in life.
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.
According to the law of nature, wherever there is an awakening of a new and stronger life, there it tries to conquer and take the place of the old and the decaying. Nature favours the dying out of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The final result of such conflict between the priestly and the other classes has been mentioned already.
The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.
I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
For 'Tis not in mere death that men die most.
What can any one person do?' he said. 'Each person does a little something,' I said, 'and there you are.
The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.
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