To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
Bruce ChatwinRead
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects how unfulfilled lives can lead to unrealistic projections of existence in the afterlife.
Bruce Chatwin's quote suggests that those who lead inactive and complacent lives often project their missed opportunities onto the idea of an afterlife. The Ancient Egyptians, with their belief in an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds, exemplify this tendency, as they envision the journeys they neglected in life manifesting in the next world, highlighting a universal human longing for fulfillment and exploration.
Themes
AfterlifeJourneyUnfulfilledEgyptiansOpportunitiesProjection
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the meaning of life during a philosophy class.
More from Bruce Chatwin
All quotes →The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.
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Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."
Bruce ChatwinRead
When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.
Bruce ChatwinRead
I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.
Bruce ChatwinRead
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When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred.
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But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-power.
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