Literary notes about oblivion (AI summary)
In literature, oblivion often functions as a powerful metaphor that encapsulates decay, erasure, and the quieting of memory. It is used to evoke images of formless ruin and the scattering of history into neglect, as when ruined remnants of the past are likened to husks blowing in the wind ([1],[2],[3]). At the same time, the word conveys a state of personal escape—whether in the form of sleep, intoxication, or a deliberate act of forgetting—as a refuge from pain and the burdens of memory ([4],[5],[6]). Authors also draw on classical and mythological symbols, such as Lethe’s waters, to suggest that oblivion serves as both a final resting place for deeds and a transformative force that wipes away the marks of time ([7],[8]).
- Understand more clear, What’s past and what’s to come is strew’d with husks And formless ruin of oblivion;
— from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare - After some ages of oblivion, Greece was awakened to new misfortunes by the arms of the Latins.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - 6. How many of those who were once so mightily acclaimed are delivered up to oblivion!
— from The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius - " The quiet stranger moved himself and his glass a trifle further away and maintained an attitude of oblivion.
— from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane - He seemed to be plunged into a sort of oblivion and hardly to know where he was.
— from The possessed : by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I assure you once for all that I did not mean to intoxicate Diana and henceforth I shall cover the past with the mantle of oblivion.’
— from Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery - Lethe lake, a lake or river of Hades, whose water brought oblivion or forgetfulness to all who drank of it.
— from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I by Edmund Spenser - [163] "Lethe, the river of oblivion."— Paradise Lost . Oblivion, forgetfulness.
— from Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
