I have lately experienced a phenomenon, a kind of profound sensation or feeling, which occurs both seldom enough to possess a measure of potency and frequently enough that I suspect it falls into some hitherto poorly explored category of universal human experience. It is difficult to describe, and I have never encountered a satisfactory attempt to render the sensation in language or indeed in any artistic medium. I don’t expect to produce an adequate account of it here, though I hope perhaps to gesture meaningfully toward one. Nevertheless, I am convinced it is something we must all feel from time to time. As I have suggested in the title of these considerations, it is an emotion, an awareness or state of mind perhaps, that approaches the sublime; there is, in other words, some vague sense of perfection in it, a quality for which I cannot quite find a name. There is in it also a kind of backward gaze, a pang of nostalgia deep enough to evoke longing as though for a lost Eden. Invariably, this feeling only ever overtakes me briefly, though one tries as best one can to grasp it and consequently strangles the sweetness of the moment in a vain, concerted effort to combat or to transcend the ephemerality of consciousness.

            For me, it is a sensation awakened, to my frustration, bewilderment, and delight, only in the midst of certain atmospheric conditions: lying half-awake late into a January morning, bedcovers tossed carelessly aside in the unconscious movements of sleep, bathed in sunlight which seems out-of-season—too warm, perhaps, or too soft—but is yet suffused with a wintry pallor, tracing with an unusually acute attention the cool sensation of the wind on my skin as it blows through the slats of the blinds and gently rattles them against the windowsill; walking downhill past a row of ordinary houses on a spring afternoon, marking the stillness of the air and the extraordinary rarity of the quiescent suburban scene, noting the slumped cloth atop front-yard flagpoles, and inhaling the faintly acrid air of a nearby lake where the sidewalk diverts its course and circles the shores like a stone ring, the artificial boundary of an artificial deep. I used occasionally to sit alone on summer nights in the backyard of my parents’ home, cradled in the cold metallic embrace of a wrought iron lawn-chair, to watch the stars overhead and ponder my relation to the infinite each point seemed manifestly to radiate in the shallow, half-considered, but nonetheless profoundly felt way which young people do in moments of the unremarkable everyday sadness or world-weariness by which many of us are beset. I felt it, too, in those moments, this curious sensation I am failing to describe, as I sat there motionless, allowing the night air and the chill it carried to sink through my flesh and into myself. I find there is something in the peculiar emotional resonance of such conditions that suggests childhood, a forgotten or imagined past, and that provokes a longing to return to it.

* * * * * *

            I know or feel that I know precisely what Emily Dickinson describes in a famous poem as “a certain slant of light.” I am convinced in any case that the feeling these brief, fragmented lines capture is of a family with the one I am attempting here to conjure. Here is the poem in full:

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

The emotion or sensation these lines so masterfully express seems nearly the antithesis of the one I am attempting by comparison to elicit. Dickinson describes the oppressive quality of this particular set of atmospheric conditions which also involve the somewhat anomalous intermingling of air and light. For Dickinson, this winter scene inspires a kind of psychic or spiritual pain, introspection, anxiety over mortality, a doleful melody before a prolonged silence. The shadows of the poem’s final stanza stand in pronounced relief with the shaft of light with which the poem begins. I find in Dickinson’s words a rare and puissant sadness woven into a belief about our natures which is both informed and produced by the immediacy and continuity of our experience; we feel as deeply as we sense the world in which we live and move that, as Tennyson wrote, we were not made to die. The poem’s lines provoke in me, as only a certain atmosphere otherwise could, a species of empty dread, a fear of emptiness itself—as though I stand at the fringes of an inscrutable void, feeling beneath my flesh the gravitational force of a future, a finality toward which I am being intractably drawn.

* * * * * *

            There’s a certain flush of wind, chilled and sun-tinged, that sweeps through Colorado mornings toward the end of September. One tastes in it a final, exuberant blush of life as the scent of late-blooming plants mixes with car exhaust and rotting leaves, the sour scent of still water and the dry, earthen character of silt—the fine windblown dust of farmland topsoil newly plowed for winter wheat. I feel in it the sensations of my youth, half-imagined perhaps, distorted pleasantly as they pass through the fickle lens of memory. I think of family trips into the Rocky Mountains. Through the windows of an Aerostar van long since confined to a junk heap, I see the hulking forms of elk and mule deer rushing past in a blur of motion. I recall the texture of my sister’s toys, the thin-worn cloth of dolls begrimed with use and companionship, with the peculiar, sincere, untainted love that only children bestow upon objects. I feel sunbeams on my skin such as can only be felt at certain altitudes, where the air is thin and thus offers a kind of proximity to holiness inaccessible to the poor souls inhabiting the plains below. I hear the wind groaning through the wooden beams of a cabin, and I remember the way my mother cried the day John Denver died.

            All of this, so diaphanous and yet so powerful, wafts on the air like a small bird and settles briefly within me, carried through the perfect atmosphere of such a September morning. The feeling, having passed through a whorl of images and words, crystallizes at last into a final thought: “what an exquisite pleasure it is to be alive.”