Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that realism limits our understanding of reality, neglecting deeper truths about human experience.
Eugene Ionesco highlights the limitations of realism, arguing that it fails to encompass the rich complexities of human existence, such as love, death, and wonder. By doing so, it confines our perspective of reality, reducing us to mere observers rather than participants in a fuller experience of life. Instead, Ionesco posits that truth lies beyond the constraints of realism, existing in our dreams and imagination where the essence of humanity thrives.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of art and imagination, one might cite this quote to emphasize the importance of dreams in understanding reality.
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.
But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.
I prefer to be accused unjustly, for then I have nothing to reproach myself with, and joyfully offer this to the good Lord. Then I humble myself at the thought that I am indeed capable of doing the thing of which I have been accused.
Individual potential of life is cosmic potential. Individual is divine deep inside. Transcendental experience awakens that divinity in man. And when you kill a man you deprive him of that birthright of it.
Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?
Into a world unknown,-the corner-stone of a nation!
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