To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Interpretation
Challenging the boundaries of oneβs identity can be fraught with risks.
Anne Carson's quote suggests that stepping beyond the narratives we have constructed for ourselves can lead to uncertainty and danger. While these myths or stories may provide comfort and structure, transcending them requires courage and can provoke challenges that test our resilience and understanding of the self.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, one could use this quote to illustrate the challenges of breaking free from limiting beliefs.
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.
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. Itβs usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.
A lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing.
Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.
The only people who want to change the Gospel are those who are unchanged by it.
We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise
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