The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the monotony and dissatisfaction of life, comparing stagnant days to stale bread.
In this quote, Bruno Schulz uses the metaphor of cold, stale bread to convey a sense of life that has become dull and uninspiring. The imagery of cutting through these hardened days with blunt knives suggests a struggle and lack of enthusiasm for life, indicating a deeper existential boredom where moments pass without joy or purpose.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming apathy in daily life, this quote from Bruno Schulz could highlight the dangers of letting days pass by without engagement.
Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.
An event may be small and insignificant in its origin , and yet, when drawn close to oneβs eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.
As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.
There are things than cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to loose their integrity in the frailty of realization.
States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
Why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away?
The evils of the body are murder, theft, and adultery; of the tongue, lying, slander, abuse and idle talk; of the mind, covetousness, hatred and error.
There remains an experience of incomparable value . . . to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled ---- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer . . . to look with new eyes on matters great and small.
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