No, it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that, it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that losing innocence is a necessary part of life, and trying to reclaim that innocence is ultimately pointless.
Elizabeth Bowen's quote speaks to the inevitability of losing innocence as we grow and experience life. It suggests that once we have moved past the simplicity of our untainted views of the world, attempting to return to that state, symbolized by a 'picnic in Eden', becomes fruitless. This illustrates how personal growth often involves leaving behind a state of purity and how engaging with the complexities of life precludes a return to a simpler, more innocent time.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of adulthood, one might quote this to illustrate the inevitability of losing one's innocence.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood orseason of Nature's penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.
Habit, of which passion must be wary, may all the same be the sweetest part of love.
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaited him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.
Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.
We know nothing at all. All our knowledge is but the knowledge of schoolchildren. The real nature of things we shall never know.
Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.
What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
The words we use for the Creator are a reflect of ourselves. If we think of God as fear and shame, we are scared and have something to be ashamed of ... But if we see love, compassion and kindness, it is because we possess these qualities.
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