. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan BolandRead
Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of human experiences across time.
Eavan Boland's quote reflects on the continuity of human experiences and the importance of memory in shaping our understanding of the past. It suggests that our current experiences will be interpreted by future generations, just as past experiences have shaped our present. It highlights the mutual dependency we have on one another's memories to capture the complexities of life and suffering, reminding us that history is a shared narrative woven from personal and collective experiences.
Themes
MemoryExperiencesHistoryInterconnectednessSuffering
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on historical interpretation, this quote could be used to illustrate the importance of remembering the complexities of past events.
More from Eavan Boland
All quotes →Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
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When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?
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There is nothing settled about a poet's identity. The becoming doesn't stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.
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If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it.
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As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.
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