I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
Interpretation
The quote critiques human arrogance and our tendency to view ourselves as superior beyond reason.
Angela Carter's quote reflects on the human condition and our inflated self-image. It suggests that rather than acknowledging our primal, flawed nature, we often elevate ourselves, drawing a comparison to angels instead of recognizing our more primal instincts and connections to the natural world. This duality indicates a dissonance between our actual behavior and our self-perception, ultimately questioning the consequences of such hubris in society.
In practice
In a discussion on human arrogance during a workshop.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.
Shape clay into a vessel; _x000D_ _x000D_ It is the space within that makes it useful. _x000D_ _x000D_ Cut doors and windows for a room; _x000D_ _x000D_ It is the holes which make it useful. _x000D_ _x000D_ Therefore benefit comes from what is there; _x000D_ _x000D_ Usefulness from what is not there.
A nation that cannot control its borders is not a nation.
It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.
The future is always present, as a promise, a lure and a temptation.
Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!
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