There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the inevitable reality of loss and the permanence of certain experiences in life.
Cormac McCarthy's quote delves into the harsh truths of existence, emphasizing the pain of loss and the acceptance that some things in life are irretrievable. It suggests that part of growing up involves learning to confront these difficult lessons, reminding us to cherish what we have, as it may not always be there.
In practice
In a speech about coping with loss, you might say, 'As Cormac McCarthy wisely noted, there's hard lessons in this world...'
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.
Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.
Miracles, contrary to popular belief, do not just happen. A miracle is the achievement of the impossible, and it is only when we put aside out greed, anger, pride and prejudice so that our minds are open and ready to accept it, that a miracle can occur.
They [Nazi captors]had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.
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