They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the vastness of existence beyond human understanding, invoking imagery of the sea and the cosmos as realms of mystery.
Cormac McCarthy's quote invites readers to contemplate the profound mysteries that lie beyond human comprehension. It suggests a world where the natural elements—the stars and the sea—harbor deeper truths that elude our everyday understanding. The imagery of 'stars drowning' and 'whales ferrying their vast souls' evokes a sense of wonder about the interconnectedness of life and the universe, urging us to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge in the face of such awe-inspiring phenomena.
In practice
This quote could be used in a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence.
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.
Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.
When people are not in the moment, they're not there to know that they're not there.
Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.
I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.
In the products of the unconscious we discover mandala symbols, that is, circular and quaternity figures which express wholeness, and whenever we wish to express wholeness, we employ just such figures.
I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.
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