Emotions

Emotions. When this word used to pop into my mind, I typically rendered it to be black and white. I believed that feelings were simple, one was either overjoyed or heartbroken. One was either jealous or proud. One was either ecstatic or petrified. However, my mind has now strung together the complexities associated with emotions, and their often imbricating manifestations and juxtapositional natures. While many perceive emotions to be individual feelings that coarse through one, in actuality, they often amalgamate with one another, causing one to feel crashes of emotional waves thrashing all at once, the emotions rippling over each other, confuddling one’s mind. The quote below perfectly encapsulates my newfound epiphany regarding the true nature of emotions and how they cascade over each other, fringing upon foreign atmospheres. And of course, it's a quote from the book that’s changed a million things in my life in addition to my outlook on my emotions, the one and only masterpiece, The Secret History, by Donna Tart. The same book that to me, is an emotion is itself, for it’s turned my heart in ways that no words of pleasurable agony can convey.

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

Beauty, a word generally confined to feelings of admiration and awe, is actually the strongest when it erupts from feelings of fear and horror, shaking one to their very bones. Beauty is an archetype for the oxymoronic connotations of emotions. Beauty shows us how emotions are rarely simple, but rather intricate far beyond our understanding.