I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the duality of life, where both hardships and joys coexist throughout history.
Michael Chabon's quote suggests a comforting understanding that the struggles and beauty of life are timeless. As a child, he found solace in recognizing that the world has always faced challenges and disasters, mixed with moments of wonder and joy. This perspective invites us to accept the complexities of existence, understanding that adversity and beauty are intrinsic to the human experience.
In practice
During a speech about resilience, one might quote Chabon to highlight the ever-present challenges of life.
A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.
I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't make my breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My mom did all of those things, and nobody ever told her when she did them that it made her a good mother.
You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.
The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.
Man has been driven out of the paradise in which he could trust his instincts.
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.
There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.
To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.
People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.