More Than A Feeling

Years ago, a slightly younger and much more optimistic me had just finished reading The Dubliners by James Joyce. It happened over a break, when I was staying at my parent's house. When I read it each story felt vital to me, and when I reached the end of the last story the feeling I was left with was overwhelming. The last paragraph of the book is one of the most famous literary passages in the whole English languages, and for the hell of it here it is:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This passage has always stirred a particular feeling in me that brings on a heady high like no other. If you haven't read Dubliners, or at least The Dead, you should, because it's an amazing book. Each time I read it, it reminds me of feeling I had reading it years ago. It's a feeling which I pursue throughout my life, and every day I feel like that is a success of kinds. This feeling, more than any other, makes me want to be a better person. It's full of sadness and lonliness, but also full of hope for something better; it's fear of dying and most importantly a sense of complete an utter freedom.  Reading Dubliners is about this feeling more than anything else for me. In the second story, "An Encounter" two boys ditch their "mundane" lives for a day, seeking excitement, and during they experience the joy of a fleeting sense of freedom. It is such an intense feeling because of its brief temporal nature.

It's in these moment that I find the reason for living. It's not when I'm happiest that really makes me keep going. It's this feeling that I get every so often that is so wonderful and scary I sometimes can't even handle it.