You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.
Jean RhysRead
I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.
Interpretation
The quote expresses deep feelings of loss and longing for a loved one, reflecting on the complexity of love and death.
In this poignant reflection, Jean Rhys articulates the repeated experience of watching a loved one suffer and ultimately die, emphasizing the emotional weight of love intertwined with loss. The imagery of light—sunlight, moonlight, and candlelight—symbolizes both presence and absence, suggesting that even as they shared moments of intimacy, the impending loss loomed large, echoing the profound impact of love that transforms into sorrow.
In practice
In a eulogy for a loved one, to express the depth of shared experiences.
You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.
If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
The musty smell, the bugs, the lonliness, this room, which is part of the street outside-this is all I want from life.
Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness, sad as an eagle without wings, sad as a violin with only one string and that one broken, sad as a woman who is growing old. Sad, sad, sad.
My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.
I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.
When once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vice, constrained by the love of God.
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
What the world needs is not 'a little bit of love', but a surgical operation.
It's hard to love yourself when you've been told your whole life that there is something wrong with you - when you are called dirty because of your skin color.
She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .
Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.
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