The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the wind in the trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings.
Interpretation
This quote explores the profound and often disorienting experience of darkness, both literally and metaphorically.
Cormac McCarthy's quote delves into the depths of night and solitude, portraying a sensory deprivation that evokes feelings of isolation and introspection. The imagery of 'blackness' represents not only the physical absence of light but also the emotional and psychological struggles one encounters in moments of vulnerability, urging readers to confront the challenges posed by their inner darkness.
In practice
This quote could be used in a reflective essay about the importance of confronting one's inner struggles.
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.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
Nonviolence against humans cannot take firm hold in society as long as brutality and violence are practiced toward other animals.
I would rather be adorned by beauty of character than jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, while character comes from within.
I yearn to live and love and burn, and yet so much of my time is spent faking and forgetting, faking and forgetting I carry out my disbelief with uninspired hands, my eyes shut, my emotions dulled, my spirit numb. In times like these I am in desperate need of truth to come to me like a blinding light, like a splinter in my soul, reminding me of the brevity of my time here on earth.
To live a life of virtue, match up your thoughts, words, and deeds.
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.
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