Thursday, February 16, 2012

On pleasant surroundings...

I do not think I have ever found anything quite so delightful as Dorothy Wordsworth's journals. Her love for the natural world, her compassion for others, and her genuine elation for what some may consider mundane or ordinary is absolutely adorable. Wile I find that many of her journal entries are very similar to one another, some a little sad, some a litttle less so, I feel as though each passage reveals so much about the loveliness of her character. While she seems to hastily rush through some of her more mundane tasks and chores, (often excluding pronouns), "Transplanted radishes ater breakfast, walked to Mr. Gell's with the books, gathered mosses and plants," you never get the sense that she resents these things but rather finds a pleasure in their simplicity worth noting. It is when Dorothy slows down her writing, using complete sentances, pronouns and adjectives that we really see what speaks to her at heart, usually something charming in nature. "I was much amused with the business of a pair of stone chats; their restless voices as they skimmed along the water following each other, their shadows under them and their returning back to the sones on the shore, chirping with the same unwearied vocie." Though she never quite descirbes her exact feelings in these passage, she is sure to describe them delicately enough for the reader to really experience them as fully as she herself. Dorothies words are a reminder to us all about the bounty of pleasure and joy at the simple yet intricately beautiful moments happening around us every day in the natural world. On a more personal note, reading her journals reminded me of how I felt at a particular moment when I was wondering through Tokyo and happend upon an exquiset garden park among hidden among the sky scrapers. I sat in the park for a long while, silently watching the people around me and feeling a kinship and familiarity with the way people were interacting with each other and the park itself. I felt as though despite the language barrier I knew exactly what the young couples and families and solitary persons were thinking and saying as they walked. I particularly enjoyed myself when a man in a business suit interupted the tranquility of the scene as he began to rush through the park, clearly in a hury, and then suddenly slowed to a stop and looked around him. he took a picture of a big twisted tree at the center of the park and then slowly and leasurely continued on his way, sauntering down the garden path. (To use one of Dorothies words). I believe somewhere within all people is this increadible, inextinguishable primordial pleasure when we are around nature. And I feel like this experience was especially connected for me in Dorothies poem Lines Written In Early Spring where Dorothy suggests that it is Man who has made man this way, extracting and distracting themselves from the extraordinariness fo the vast and beautiful world around us.

3 comments:

  1. This is not to demean your post in any way, but "Dorothies." I love it.

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    1. hahaha :) Yeah, I wrote it rather hastily. Taylor pointed that out to me, but I didn't even fix it.

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    2. Also just realized I did it multiple times. *embarrassed*

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