and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the indifference of the world to individual struggles, regardless of one's status or identity.
In this quote by Cormac McCarthy, the act of holding out hands symbolizes a desire for connection or grounding in a world that feels chaotic and indifferent. It highlights the universal experiences of humanity—wealth, age, race—rendering individual identities insignificant against the relentless passage of time and the world's apathy towards personal struggles, underscoring themes of existential reflection and the shared human condition.
In practice
During a discussion on existentialism, this quote can illustrate the indifference of the universe.
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.
We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
Every video I'm in, every magazine cover, they stretch you; they make you perfect. It's not real life.
The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
I do not deny certain kinds of biological differences. But I always ask under what conditions, under what discursive and institutional conditions, do certain biological differences - and they're not necessary ones, given the anomalous state of bodies in the world - become the salient characteristics of sex.
And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.
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