The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
Interpretation
Grief can create strong connections between people who share similar losses.
This quote emphasizes that the relationships forged through shared experiences of grief are some of the most profound. It suggests that in times of sorrow, individuals come together in a meaningful way, creating a sense of community and understanding that transcends ordinary bonds.
In practice
In a eulogy, one might highlight how shared grief can unite friends and family.
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.
Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.
The Master said of Gong Yechang, βHe is marriageable. Although he was once imprisoned and branded as a criminal, he was in fact innocent of any crime.β The Master gave him his daughter in marriage. (Analects 5.1)
Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.
It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You're suddenly somebody's wife. And you're like, 'Oh, I'm half of a couple now. I've lost me.'
If you would marry suitably, marry your equal.
Forgiveness is taking seriously the awfulness of what has happened when you are treated unfairly. Forgiveness is not pretending that things are other than the way they are.
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