sublimity

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

-David Herbert Lawrence


I've been immersed these past few years with questions of consciousness, of what it is to be alive, of what it is to be human. Chalk it all up to an influential English teacher, a bit of Walt Whitman and the vision of Thomas Jefferson clinging for dear life to the only piece of safety standing between him and peril:

"Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach[e]. If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful in an equal extreme. It is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven, the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!"

Oh, how I long for emotions arising from the sublime. Every now and then I'm overwhelmed with swells of life and joy, though I've grown to suspect my incessant desire to dwell consistently in such manners may be more a lifetime's endeavor than the longing of a moment. Perhaps it is the human condition that we are resigned to--as Lawrence so succinctly phrases it--troubling, that we are destined to come alive little by little only as life whispers to us, converting our shamed selves. Until then this grain of dirt, this speck of dust shouts in desperation at the blinking stars: I am here!