| |
A Page
from Megan's Journal
April 15, 2006
I’m
back home—it’s early in the morning and my window is open. I
woke up to the sound of birds chirping. Several kinds of
birds chirping back at one another. And since we live in a
hollow, I can judge how far away the bird is by how much its
chirp resounds through the hollow. I love coming home—it’s
the small stuff like this that make me miss it even more when
I go back to Shepherd. Because, while Shepherdstown is
gorgeous in the spring, it doesn’t have the air of natural
simplicity that home does. I don’t wake up to birds
chirping—and all of the blooming trees have been carefully
chosen and placed for the best effect. And while I do
appreciate that and love the trees, there’s just something
about driving down a dirt road with fields on one side and
trees on the other; then looking carefully into the trees, you
see patches of Johnny-Jump-Ups and little white star flowers.
These are my roots. I guess deep at heart I’m just a country
girl—I love my mountains and fields and runs and birds and
just open Nature.
In
my 18th Century class, we read Burke and discussed
his theory that the greatest human emotion is fear, so in
order for something to be wholly beautiful, it has to produce
that ultimate emotion, and therefore be fearful. We discussed
the words “awesome” and “awful” and how they relate to this
theory—the most beautiful (or awesome) things [according to
Burke] produce a feeling of awe and fear. I don’t think that
I agree with him to the sense that the most beautiful things
have to cause fear; I believe that they do have to cause some
strong emotion, just not necessarily fear. Thus far, I’ve
found that most beautiful things tend to hurt. They somehow
reach into me and touch that inner core and produce feelings
of intense sadness, loneliness, and sometimes almost despair.
But the sights that draw forth these emotions aren’t
necessarily great works of art or carefully planned gardens—it
can be the most fleeting glimpse of a gully in between two
hills, covered with a layer of leaves, broken tree branches
and dead trees leaning against the ones still standing, beams
of light shining down from in between clusters of leaves, and
sometimes a run going right through the middle of it all. All
taken in as we whiz by in our car, but still just hurting
because it makes me know that something is missing. That
simple kind of beauty? The appreciation of that kind of
beauty? Or the promise of some other world that I know can’t
really exist?
"The
passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when
those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and
astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its
motions are suspended with some degree of horror."—Edmund
Burke |