We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the fleeting nature of youth and the illusion of immortality.
Anne Carson's quote captures the poignant realization that youth, often seen as eternal and vibrant, is ultimately temporary. As individuals transition from the high spirits of youth to the sobering realities of life, they confront the inevitable decline of vitality and face the harsh truth that mortality is inescapable. The seduction of feeling immortal during one's youth can lead to a stark awakening when the vibrancy begins to fade, urging a reflection on the passage of time and the impermanence of life.
In practice
In a graduation speech to reflect on the fleeting nature of youth and the responsibility that comes with adulthood.
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.
You do not explain the tree by telling of the water it has drunk, the minerals it has absorbed, and the sunlight that strengthened it.
The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God.
Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.
I feel like a lot of times we're put in a box that people always say: 'Oh, sports and politics should stay separate and all this.' And I say, yes, but also at the same time, I'm a human first before I'm a tennis player.
The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.