Your skin is prickly from fatigue and pain and there is a hissing in your ears. Time passes and the pills are taking hold like a glowing white planet coming into view. A reverse eclipse. And you watch with your eyes closed. The white planet is half exposed, it grips your heart in its light and seems to be pulling you forward and now you feel that you are falling. You are awake but dreaming. "The earth is not beautiful but the universe is," you say.
Interpretation
This quote reflects a contemplation on the contrast between suffering in the present and the beauty of the universe beyond our immediate experience.
In this quote, Patrick Dewitt captures a moment of intense physical and emotional distress, yet amidst this turmoil, there arises a sense of cosmic beauty and transcendence. The imagery of a 'glowing white planet' evokes a feeling of wonder that contrasts sharply with the pain described. It suggests that even when life feels burdensome and the world seems unlovely, there is a larger, more beautiful reality in the universe that invites us to see beyond our immediate struggles. Awakened yet dreaming, the speaker realizes that their suffering is part of a grander existential experience.
In practice
During a difficult moment in therapy, one might quote this to reflect on the feeling of suffering while trying to find beauty in the experience.
Belief Systems contradict both science and ordinary "common sense." B.S. contradicts science, because it claims certitude and science can never achieve certitude: it can only say, "This model"- or theory, or interpretation of the data- "fits more of the facts known at this date than any rival model." We can never know if the model will fit the facts that might come to light in the next millennium or even in the next week.
Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.
She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.
To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry; to the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its music; to the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace.
How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur or feathers?
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