Woodcutter. Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of being without fruit. Why was I born among mirrors? Day goes round and round me. The night copies me in all its stars. I want to live without my reflection. And then let me dream that ants and thistledown are my leaves and my parrots.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a desire to escape self-reflection and the pain of existential awareness.
In this poignant quote, Federico Garcia Lorca explores the theme of identity and the burdens that come with self-awareness. The metaphor of the woodcutter cutting the shadow signifies a yearning to be free from the constant self-examination and the existential angst of realizing one's place in the world. Lorca's imagery of nature, such as ants and thistledown, suggests a longing for a simpler existence, away from the complexities of life and self-perception.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about existential philosophy in a classroom setting.
The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
Death laid its eggs in the wound
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
"Uncertainty" is NOT "I don't know." It is "I can't know." "I am uncertain" does not mean "I could be certain."
Attending church does not necessarily mean living the principles taught in those meeting. You can be active in a church but inactive in its gospel.
We're poor little lambs who've lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa! We're little black sheep who've gone astray, Baa-aa-aa! Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to Eternity, God ha' mercy on such as we, Baa! Yah! Bah!
Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.
Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free.
Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time.
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