Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the profound impact of fundamental human experiences on our existence.
In this quote, Thomas Lynch reflects on the central themes of life that shape our identities and experiences—sex, love, grief, and death. He suggests that these elements are intertwined, influencing how we live and ultimately how we meet our end, serving as both creators and destroyers of our emotional realities.
In practice
In a eulogy reflecting on a loved one's life.
Whatever's there to feel, feel it—the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence.
To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half.
Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.
He works in us and with us, not against us or without us; so that his assistance is an encouragement to the facilitating of the work, and no occasion of neglect as to the work itself.
My books are not about how it feels to be a black man. My books are about how it feels to be a human being, and part of what I'm trying to sort out is what we mean - what I mean, what you mean, what everybody in the culture means - when they say 'black man,' or they say 'white person.'
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
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