Woodcutter. Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of being without fruit. Why was I born among mirrors? Day goes round and round me. The night copies me in all its stars. I want to live without my reflection. And then let me dream that ants and thistledown are my leaves and my parrots.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a desire to escape self-reflection and the pain of existential awareness.
In this poignant quote, Federico Garcia Lorca explores the theme of identity and the burdens that come with self-awareness. The metaphor of the woodcutter cutting the shadow signifies a yearning to be free from the constant self-examination and the existential angst of realizing one's place in the world. Lorca's imagery of nature, such as ants and thistledown, suggests a longing for a simpler existence, away from the complexities of life and self-perception.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about existential philosophy in a classroom setting.
The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.
Death laid its eggs in the wound
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apertheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.
A sound philosophy of life, I think, may be the most valuable asset for a psychiatrist to have when he is treating a patient.
There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End.
It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.
Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings.
Here between the hither and the farther shore_x000D_ _x000D_ While time is withdrawn, consider the future_x000D_ _x000D_ And the past with an equal mind.
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