To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
Interpretation
The struggle of perception and understanding can cause deep emotional pain.
This quote expresses the intense inner conflict that arises from the experience of awareness and perception. To 'see' in this context refers to a heightened state of understanding or insight, which can be overwhelming and frightening. The pain of awareness, described metaphorically as tearing apart from forehead to throat, highlights the profound emotional turmoil that can accompany deep comprehension of oneβs reality or existence.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, one might use this quote to highlight the struggle of coming to terms with reality.
I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.
Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare β which is perhaps, for both, the fact of not existing. Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude.
If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
When you inhale, you are taking the strength from God. When you exhale, it represents the service you are giving to the world.
To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Again I ask whence it happened that the fall of Adam involved, without remedy, in eternal death so many nations, together with their infant children, except because it so seemed good to God? A decree horrible, I confess, and yet true.
God [is] not the exclusive property of any one tradition. The divine light [cannot] be confined to a single lamp, belonging to the East or the West, but enlightens all human beings.
Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group from another.
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