|
(2013
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2013 #2a: Short Essay (Favorite Passage) |
LITR 4232 |
 |
Mickey Thames
Reach for
the Sky
The most
poignant, and most personal of the passages we’ve covered this semester has to
be from Chapter 1 of Nature,
by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
[6]
To go into
solitude, a man needs
to retire as much from his chamber [room, enclosure] as from society. I am not
solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But
if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and
what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this
design, to give man,
in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of
the sublime.
[7]
Seen in the
streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars
should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore;
and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had
been shown!* But every night come out these envoys
of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.* [admonishing =
warning, counseling. *This sentence became epigraph and inspiration for Isaac
Asimov's "Nightfall" (1941), voted best pre-Nebula Award science fiction story]
[8]
The stars
awaken a certain reverence, because though always
present, they are
inaccessible; but all
natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their
influence
This passage
resonates with me because I was raised in Houston, Texas. The smog of the city
blacks out all but a few points of light, and I thought that was what the stars
were for the first 9 years of my life. According to this passage, my youth, my
time of supposed enlightened living according to Emerson, was lacking a very
serious component. My perceptions however, were very violently changed after a
trip deep into the Texas Hill Country. Staying in a Depression era house, I
wandered outside at night, expecting to see my familiar points of light. What I
instead saw tore my idea of the night apart. I looked up, and my sky was all so
very crowded, full of violent light and swirling dust, and it was so enormous.
It was larger than any sky I’d ever beheld, and I fell over backwards. Never in
my life had I felt so very small. It both scared and awed me, this night sky,
and the stars. I was experiencing, for the first time in my young life, the
truly sublime.
Emerson here captures the sublime,
to me, in that same manner. He tells the reader, that to be truly in solitude,
requires the stars to appreciate what being alone really means. It gives
perspective to the individual, as to how truly very small one is. But that the
individual may also appreciate, by willful design it seems, that beauty. The
sublime is seen as part of the divine or supernatural, a common idea woven
throughout Romanticism.
It is the idea
however, of the stars only appearing once in a thousand years, and the effect it
would have on humanity, that truly equates to my experience of the sublime.
Something so amazing that you have to tell everyone you know, everyone you can
get to, for as long as you can, whether it was scary or amazing or both. That is
the sublime I know and remember, and it seems, that’s the sublime Emerson does
too.
