And thus when by Poetry—or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods—we find ourselves melted into tears—we weep then … through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.
—Poe, “The Heresy of the Didactic”
The Feeling.
Like, post-nasal drip with caramel. A certain downshift in regions of the sternum & below.
I think EAP’s designation of the “glimpses” comes close to articulating what that Feeling is, that blissed-out/heartbreaking sensation. It’s close to nostalgia but nostalgia assumes the real occurrence of something in one’s past, and an ensuing longing-for, but this is more like (forgive me, it’s early and cold in the Cottage, and the post is labeled ‘imprecision’ after all) profound nostalgia for what you never had/could have, combined with despair that you will never, in fact, attain it.
It’s the richer, fattier, brinier version of nostalgia.
After two weeks of procrastination, I finally went to see “Avatar”.
I cannot believe I began a paragraph this way.
So: I will spare the Interwebs my opinions/thought/theories/condemnations of the film and offer only that those were real tears under enormous 3-D glasses. And thank you, Mr. Cameron, for giving me the Feeling.
