To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
Interpretation
The struggle of perception and understanding can cause deep emotional pain.
This quote expresses the intense inner conflict that arises from the experience of awareness and perception. To 'see' in this context refers to a heightened state of understanding or insight, which can be overwhelming and frightening. The pain of awareness, described metaphorically as tearing apart from forehead to throat, highlights the profound emotional turmoil that can accompany deep comprehension of oneβs reality or existence.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, one might use this quote to highlight the struggle of coming to terms with reality.
I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.
Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare β which is perhaps, for both, the fact of not existing. Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude.
If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.
Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.
An appeal to fear never finds an echo in German hearts.
What politicians do is they never get the rhetoric wrong, and the price they pay is they don't speak the truth as they see it. Now, I will speak truth as I see it, and sometimes I don't get the rhetoric right. I think that's a fair trade-off.
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
Imagine a civilisation that's way in advance of us wants to communicate with us, and assist us in our development. The information we provide to them must reflect our highest aspirations and ideals, and not just be some crazy person's bizarre politics or religion.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.