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In the daytime there was something hard and edgy about what I contained, something dry and barren, as if I comprised some singular realm of the negative, where so much was about desisting, declining, abstaining.
He was a capable man in many ways, but quite unable to apply himself, and now his aptitude simply lay there with no earthly use, like a field left fallow. Her father had been exactly the same.
But in view of my propensity to feel guilt—I couldn’t actually kill a fly without feeling torment—I realized that I would surely give myself away.
Could a person live without a name? I wondered at once. Without identity? Could a person exist without being connected to anything? Unbound to any past or history, family or society?
But even then, I think, I’d begun to realize that the ties that bind are inside a person, and that disconnecting
But even then, I think, I’d begun to realize that the ties that bind are inside a person, and that disconnecting from the external world was unlikely to make a difference.
Its grandness lay in the storm it had precipitated inside him, and it was the storm he wanted to convey, not the thought on its own.
Its grandness lay in the storm it had precipitated inside him, and it was the storm he wanted to convey, not the thought on its own. The thought had to be supported from below, underpinned and lifted by the thoughts that surrounded it, in order that it might produce the gasp of awe that he considered it to be worth.
What happens to the bird does not concern it. It was the most radical thought I had ever known. It would free me from all pain, all suffering. What happens to me does not concern me.
What happens to the bird does not concern it. It was the most radical thought I had ever known. It would free me from all pain, all suffering. What happens to me does not concern me. This required absolute faith and absolute abandonment to God, as the lily of the field and the bird of the sky exemplified. Even in deepest sorrow, with so frightful a tomorrow, the bird was unconditionally joyful. Sorrow and tomorrow did not concern it, but were given over to God.
Ihad thought about this all through the summer, and read accordingly, though of course without ambition of coming to any conclusion, for God was not something firm that allowed itself to be easily grasped.
Relating to death is a bit like relating to God, only the other way round: intellectually, I understand that God and the Divine do not exist, but I believe nevertheless that they do. In other words: I believe that I am not to die, and that God exists, at the same time as I know the opposite to be the case.
Relating to death is a bit like relating to God, only the other way round: intellectually, I understand that God and the Divine do not exist, but I believe nevertheless that they do. In other words: I believe that I am not to die, and that God exists, at the same time as I know the opposite to be the case. What does it mean to know? What does it mean to believe?
Death belongs to the future—perhaps it even establishes the future—and can be perceived only as a future occurrence, for when death comes, the conscious mind, and its consciousness of death, ceases to exist.
that we derive from the animals, or at least in some way must have lived as them, and that the revelation
that we derive from the animals, or at least in some way must have lived as them, and that the revelation of death was a fall from that state, a fall that made us what we are now.