It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the transient nature of existence and the idea that life consists of fleeting moments.
In this thought-provoking quote by Thomas Pynchon, the author contemplates the nature of human existence, suggesting that instead of a final message or homecoming, our lives are composed of countless 'last moments.' These moments, while seemingly insignificant, collectively form the essence of our history and experience. Pynchon challenges the notion of a predetermined purpose or destination, urging us to recognize the value in each fleeting moment instead of seeking a distant goal or resolution.
In practice
During a speech about mindfulness, one could use this quote to illustrate the importance of living in the present.
But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.
If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.
Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.
To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
The socialism I believe in isn't really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it's the way I see football and the way I see life.
Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.
Every society has the criminals it deserves.
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