Weather, Geography, and the Spirit

Yesterday was a wonderful day for January 12th. I think it was around forty degrees. All day long there was a strong, warm breeze to push you along wherever you were going that smelled of freshly-melted snow. I forget the exact occasion, but I was walking from my apartment to campus while taking in the scenery that is Washington St. For whatever reason I was looking at the houses and campus buildings and the trees stripped naked by winter and flayed by the storm and they all seemed crisper, more richly defined and solid than I ever remembered them being. This was the same path I've walked all year but it felt totally new. I think the term for my experience is called "jamais vu," the opposite of deja vu.

Yet despite this intriguing perception something was lacking. Then I realized what it was. Nothing that surrounded me besides the ground itself had been there for over a hundred years. I suddenly felt rootless. I don't know the exact date of when Marion was founded, but I'm fairly certain that it can't be all that old. (I think Indiana was founded in 1819 and that's not all that old either.) On my stretch of Washington St I'm pretty sure that besides the Administration building nothing else had been there for more than eighty years. Historically that's not very long.

This may be the slight ache I feel just outside myself. As if there's a tension between the ancient ground and the modernity we have built upon it. Perhaps the ache is our country's growing pains. I didn't feel this way in the English landscape. London is still scattered with Hadrian's Wall and Westminster Abbey and on and on. Maybe the phrase "a sense of history" should be taken literally. Because for a moment there I think I felt it.