It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.
Interpretation
Education deeply influences our personal perspectives and connections to the world.
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of education, suggesting that it not only imparts knowledge but also personalizes our understanding of the world around us. Cormac McCarthy points to the idea that genuine education helps individuals relate to their experiences and surroundings on a more intimate level, fostering a sense of personal connection and insight.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of lifelong learning, one might use this quote to illustrate how education enriches personal experiences.
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.
The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school.
A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
What we need is a world full of miracles, like the miracle of seeing the young child seeking work and independence, and manifesting a wealth of enthusiasm and love.
The Gospel which we possess was not given to us only to be admired, talked of, and professed - but to be practiced.
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
This applies to many film jobs, not just editing: half the job is doing the job, and the other half is finding ways to get along with people and tuning yourself in to the delicacy of the situation.
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