The Simple Things

Okay, so...
I absolutely love the poem that I was assigned to memorize ("Vacancy in the Park"). The opening lines immediately grabbed me:

"March... Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what."

I love the little things the world has to offer. Walking down the street, I am usually looking down, not because I'm ignoring the world around me, but because I am trying to absorb the miniscule things that usually go unnoticed. I fall in love with the cracks in the sidewalk, a trampled cigarette butt, the corner where the sidewalk meets a building, creases on a page in a book, graffiti in a bathroom stall. Each of these has a story, and I love to imagine the stories behind them.

This is what this poem says to me. I picture old tracks in Spring snow, melted slightly so that they are deformed, but still traveling to an unknown destination. These footsteps are memories of something that has gone by. It really does not matter what it is, just that it happened.

To me, this is sublime. We leave our memories unintentionally. We know nothing of the person who left these footprints except that they were here and now they are not. The world serves as our record-keeper and we each leave a mark. These footprints will fade, but they are here now, and that's what matters.

I have had a hard time connecting Lucretius with the sublime. I can understand his reasoning, how we can feel sublime knowing that this is the only time we have and we must cherish it. We can only truly enjoy something if we know it will be gone someday. However, I had a hard time feeling sublime with this mindset. If all we face is an eternity of nothing, what's the point? Why are we even here? This seems to be the opposite of sublime to me.

However, reading this poem, I understand. Our time on this Earth is beautiful. We each leave our footprints, our memories, our mark on this world. We may be gone, but we leave something behind. Eventually we will be forgotten and it will seem as though our lives do not matter, but really it's all just cracks in the sidewalk, graffiti in a bathroom stall, footprints in March snow... Our lives are the things that go unnoticed, the imperfections, but we are still here. We still matter. This is sublime: true understanding. The simple things.

I don't know, maybe I'm way off. But these two lines really spoke to me. These are the lines that will fester in my mind and stay with me for a while.