Within this arena, which grows more stable night after day, generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the cycle of life and the legacy of generations through creativity and love.
In this profound quote, Nikos Kazantzakis explores the essence of human existence, emphasizing that life is a continuous cycle where generations rise and fall. He suggests that through acts of creation, passion, study, and love, individuals confront the inevitable fading of their predecessors while adding their unique contributions to the world, thus bridging the past with the present in an unwavering quest for understanding and meaning.
In practice
In a graduation speech about the future, one might reflect on the importance of carrying forward the wisdom of past generations.
A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.
What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?
I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.
The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God. [...] has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. [...] My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. [...] And my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
It doesn't sound too good to say I am the son of a landowner, so let us rather say I am the grandson of exploited Galician peasants.
The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.
Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
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