Nostalgic Aches

The world's natural beauty is very powerfully effective, I believe, on a soul receptive to its influence. Such a receptiveness is generally a habitual turn towards beauty somehow achieved in childhod - not that it could not come later in life. I believe that my upbringing has been such as to produce within my own soul a certain aptitude towards the receipt of certain manners of worldly splendor perhaps surpassing other men's. In my case, the education has all been familial, and through the repitious enjoyment of the same sets of alpine beauty again and again under the guidance and from within the sphere of my family, I have come to love the Sierra Nevada with a love I think rightly in accord with its merits. It is there I am most truly at home - though I cannot express exactly in what sense I feel so strongly that I am home. It is not the sense that I feel at home with my wife, in our house. The feeling is different, and I am not sure how. I believe the Romantics are tapping into this feeling (the Lake District of England being for them my Sierras). Therefore I refer the reader to the words of William Wordsworth, who expresses so much more excellently than me, this very feeling in the opening of his Prelude.

OH there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale 10
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me.

In all of my senses of enjoyment encompassed by the Sierras, this feeling of release now is coming to predominate. But, as a child, it was of course, never the most powerful influence. I think the pleasure is the sweeter, thereby, for the splendor of the beauty of the world is the more sweetly and unknowingly enjoyed by a child because of his relative freedom of situation.

As with anything loved which is separated from us by space or time, any small reminder may bring crashing into one's mind a thousand pleasant memories and thoughts - pleasant and joyous in themselves - but pained by the coloring of nostalgia that necessarily arises (as bile at a distasteful scene) when the fact of its distance impresses itself powerfully and fully upon us. Such has been my lot today, when I found a stranger's Flickr account, completely by chance, on the internet. There are many beautiful photographs in the link I am putting below filled with pictures of places that I have been, or would visit, portrayed in all of their most spectacular glory. Therefore, I recommend them to you all.

A Stranger's Flickr Account

I spent two nights at Pioneer Basin on a backpack trip, once. Mono Lake I have seen innumerable times, and it is special because of how close it is to where I proposed, as well. I've never been over Pine Creek Pass, but the lakes he shows are typical of the kind of lake ornamenting the craggy back country of the High Sierra.

I also recommend to you this other Wordsworth poem - Daffodils. It comments on the restorative power of memory as an intercessor between us and the object of our love.

The Daffodils
By William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

I think he may overstate memory's power, personally, but he has immortalized forever a powerful truth - one that we may all use to our advantage.