And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.
Arthur RimbaudRead
As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a sense of losing guidance in difficult situations.
Arthur Rimbaud suggests that as one faces overwhelming obstacles in life, such as 'impassable rivers', the familiar forms of guidance or support, represented by 'ferrymen', can become absent or ineffective. This evokes a feeling of isolation and the realization that one must navigate through challenges alone, highlighting the complexities and uncertainties of life.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming personal challenges
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.
My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?
In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?
So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
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