The 50th Law - 50 Cent [96]
Understand: to keep death out, we bathe our minds in banality and routines; we create the illusion that it is not around us in any form. This gives us a momentary peace, but we lose all sense of connection to something larger, to life itself. We are not really living until we come to terms with our mortality. Becoming aware of the Sublime around us is a way to convert our fears into something meaningful and active, to counter the repressions of our culture. The Sublime in any form tends to evoke feelings of awe and power. Through awareness of what it is, we can open our minds to the experience and actively search it out. The following are the four sensations of a sublime moment and how to conjure them.
THE SENSE OF REBIRTH
Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway felt completely suffocated by all the conformity and banality of life there. It made him feel dead inside. He yearned to explore the wider world, and so in 1917, at the age of eighteen, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, at one of the war fronts. There he felt himself oddly impelled towards death and danger. In one incident he was nearly killed by exploding shrapnel, and the experience forever altered his way of thinking. “I died then…. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.” This feeling remained in the back of his mind for months and years to come, and it was oddly exhilarating. Surviving death in this way made him feel like he was reborn inside. Now he could write of his experiences and make his work vibrate with emotion.
This feeling, however, would fade. He would be forced into some boring journalistic job or the routines of married life. That inner deadness returned and his writing would suffer. He needed to feel that closeness to death in life again. To do so, he would have to expose himself to new dangers. This meant reporting on front-line activity in the Spanish Civil War, and later covering the bloodiest battles in France in World War II—in both cases going beyond reporting and involving himself in combat. He took up bullfighting, deep-sea fishing, and big-game hunting. He would suffer innumerable auto and airplane accidents, but that would only spur his need for more risk. Out of each experience, that sensation of being sparked back to life would return, and he could find his way to yet another novel.
This feeling of having your soul pulled out of your body like a handkerchief is the essence of a sublime sensation. For Hemingway it could be conjured only by something extreme, by a brush with death itself. We, however, can feel the sensation and its reviving benefits in smaller doses. Whenever life feels particularly dull or confining, we can force ourselves to leave familiar ground. This could mean traveling to some particularly exotic location, attempting something physically challenging (a sea voyage or scaling a mountain), or simply embarking on a new venture in which we are not certain we can succeed. In each case we are experiencing a moment of powerlessness in the face of something large and overwhelming. This feeling of control slipping out of our hands, however short and slight, is a brush with death. We may not make it; we have to raise our level of effort. In the process, our minds are exposed to new sensations. When we finish the voyage or task and come to safe ground, we feel as if we are reborn. We felt that slight pull of the handkerchief; we now have a heightened appreciation for life and a desire to live it more fully.
THE SENSE OF EVANESCENCE AND URGENCY
The first half of the fourteenth century in Japan was a time of intense turmoil—palace