I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.
Interpretation
The quote critiques human arrogance and our tendency to view ourselves as superior beyond reason.
Angela Carter's quote reflects on the human condition and our inflated self-image. It suggests that rather than acknowledging our primal, flawed nature, we often elevate ourselves, drawing a comparison to angels instead of recognizing our more primal instincts and connections to the natural world. This duality indicates a dissonance between our actual behavior and our self-perception, ultimately questioning the consequences of such hubris in society.
In practice
In a discussion on human arrogance during a workshop.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written β heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.
To will everything that God wills, and to will it always, in all circumstances and without reservations: that is the kingdom of God which is entirely within.
We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag β¦? "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare.
The best hijab is in the eyes of the beholder.
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