We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the human tendency to ignore or avoid the knowledge of impending doom.
This quote expresses the paradox of awareness and denial; it suggests that while we may have a sense of the challenges or catastrophes that lie ahead, we often choose to ignore or suppress that realization. The vivid imagery of a falling piano emphasizes the absurdity and inevitability of certain unfortunate events, akin to how people sometimes navigate life with a blend of apprehension and denial about their consequences.
In practice
During a lecture on human psychology, this quote might be used to illustrate how people cope with anxiety about the future.
I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability β the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.
Help, master, help! here's a fish hangs in the net, like a poor man's right in the law; 'twill hardly come out.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
You never know who it's going to be, or what they'll bring, but whatever it is, it's always exactly what is needed.
And out of good still to find means of evil.
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