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!
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the intensity of experience and the passage of time, suggesting moments of crisis or revelation.
Federico Garcia Lorca's quote captures the profound sense of urgency and emotional pain associated with a specific time of day, 'five in the afternoon'. It conveys a feeling of inevitability and fatalism as the imagery of burning wounds juxtaposes the mundane passage of time with the intensity of human experience and suffering. The repetitive emphasis on 'five in the afternoon' suggests a moment that is pivotal, encapsulating both personal turmoil and a collective response to it.
In practice
In a speech about perseverance, one might say, 'Remember Lorca's words, the wounds may burn, but we must face the time, even when it feels fatal.'
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.
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.
Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.
What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.
One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep.
The mind is a product of experience. It is the result of past thinking and is modified by present thinking.
Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.
I think about never losing my voice, never giving in, never selling out, always keeping black, always sticking to the street. Staying neighborhood and not Hollywood.
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