Landscape Amid Crashing Waves

A new take on the sublime

John Adams notes to The Dharma at Big Sur
East Coast / West Coast: Some Musical Autobiography

Coming upon the California coast is a different experience altogether. Rather than gently yielding ground to the water the Western shelf drops off violently, often from dizzying heights, as it does at Big Sur, the stretch of coastal precipice midway between Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara. Here the current pounds and smashes the littoral in a slow, lazy rhythm of terrifying power. For a newcomer the first exposure produces a visceral effect of great emotional complexity. Many writers have tried to describe it directly, but Jack Kerouac did it best. In both his poetry and his novels he comes the closest to evoking my own sense of liberation and excitement, an ecstasy that is nevertheless tinged with that melancholy expressed in the first of Buddha's Four Noble Truths: "All life is sorrowful."

The music travels to you if you cannot be there. Be here.

And so for day 2397
06.07.2013