Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all.
Interpretation
The essence of actions is recognized and defined by the witness or observer.
Cormac McCarthy's quote emphasizes the fundamental role of the witness in giving meaning to actions. Without someone to observe or interpret those actions, they lack significance, suggesting that our understanding of reality is heavily reliant on perception and interpretation. The act itself may hold no intrinsic value if there is no one to witness it, indicating the importance of perspective in shaping our realities.
In practice
In a discussion on the importance of perspective in storytelling.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
Let's worship Divinity, but understand the divinity we worship is beyond our comprehension.
Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.
Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.
It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labour as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies.
I went to medical school because I wanted to ask the big questions. Do we have a soul? Does God exist? What happens after death?
The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible.
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