The Waking Life, Consciousness, and Existence Quotes

This sentence, like many of Roethke’s, would drive an English language learner crazy. Does the speaker mean that he wakes in order to sleep, to the nature of sleep, or that he is halfway between waking and sleeping? Just like those poets to take simple words and make the idea behind them so complex. It’s a slow process, we get that, but to what? With such a paradox as this, we realize we’ve entered a consciousness unlike the usual programming. We’re about to be honored with an account of a vision.

What could be more wholesome or hopeful than learning? No matter how bad things get, and we all know they can get pretty bad, if you’ve learned something from it, there’s a kind of redemption. The speaker may be obliged to go where he does, but he’s not being dragged along mindlessly. Nope. He’s gaining greater knowledge and experience.

Look out for cogitation overload! This one line has three different kinds of consciousness in various combinations. Thinking, feeling, knowing—how are they distinct? If we think by feeling, can we say we feel by thinking, or does it work that way? What’s the math term for that? “Commutative,” right? Didn’t expect to find such a math geek word in describing a poem, did you? But it’s not so out of place, after all.

The speaker is asking us to consider how we come to our understanding of the world. Do you we get it by thinking? Feeling? Knowing? Can we ever really know anything, or is the world as subjective as “getting” it through our own feeling might lead us to believe?

Here we’re served up a kind of hearing that is like feeling or seeing, and a kind of being that dances like a smile in the place of thoughts, “ear to ear.” This is a moment of true ecstasy in the poem. The speaker is beside himself, apart from his being enough to hear it, as it dances.

If this line were a sentence in an essay, your teacher would certainly deduct points for vagueness. She might write in the margin, “what falls away?” She would circle “always” and write “are you missing a word here?” She would tell you not to start a sentence with “And.” We can imagine that Roethke knew better, but committed these crimes against language conventions anyway. What a renegade!

But why did he do it? With these fractures and ambiguities and gaps, maybe he’s trying to get at what might be the deepest moment in the progression of his reverie on consciousness. Maybe what he wanted to say was “always falls away and is near,” but that didn’t work with the metrical scheme. Maybe he liked the way always and away seemed to be versions of one another (after letters have fallen away). It seems that the speaker is trying to say something about the nature of eternity, that at the moment it seems to leave you it is at its closest. Or maybe Roethke procrastinated and didn’t leave himself enough time to correct these “errors.”