Korea is the whitest I’ve ever seen it. Much of it has melted by now, of course, but when I woke this morning, there were at least a couple inches of snow blanketing the Hongsan hills. Regardless, I hardly expected school to be closed…and yet, it was! The caretaker met me at the gate, where he was shoveling snow, and told me, “No English.” It’s amazing to be in a place where a mere two inches can stop school—in Montana, it could be 40 below with six feet of snow and I think we’d still have school! I was quite happy to have the time off—sure, it wasn’t the best hiking weather, but I did have time to think and plan and dream while making my mark across the subdued landscape. I bused (via Buyeo) to the nearby town of Imcheon, from where I walked to Daejosa, where there is a large statue of the Buddha of the Future. I think it’s ten meters. Ten impressive, imposing meters. Evidently it’s nothing remarkable artistically—the draw is the size. I also visited the fortress next door and slid around on the walls, getting all wet in the process. And then I walked back to Hongsan—about 14 kilometers, I’d estimate. It took me two and a half hours of steady trudging. I was tired of striding by the end, but I was glad I’d decided to forgo the bus—I’d had enough of waiting around for small-town buses last weekend. Plus, I got to try out my navigation skills and was impressed I was able to identify the hills of Hongsan from a distance, coming from a direction I’d never been before. Perhaps I will become a successful navigator after all.
I was thinking as I was walking today about the sublime. Last night I read a section about sublimity in my new book, The Art of Travel, and it struck me as supremely relevant to my current quest for mountains and majestic beauty. Alain de Botton writes that
There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early-autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing.
But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and boulder-strewn deserts. In their presence one was likely to experience, and could count on being understood if one reported that one had felt, a sense of the sublime. (p. 159)
This is what I have been searching for: the sublime. I feel I am constantly encountering such beauty in the world, be it stark snow-covered branches against a shimmery blue sky, or massive rock shards threatening the sun, or a quiet temple nestled against a mountainside, or any number of other things I see every day and try and fail to capture with my camera. This is what makes my life worth living: that glimpse of simple beauty, of raw majesty, of unreplicable awe and amazement. In de Botton’s words: “Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves” (p. 167). Is there anything more exhilarating than this humility before nature? This affirmation of inclusion, however small, in such a gorgeous world?
In the less lofty recesses of my mind, I also was thinking about this guy we encountered while hitchhiking in Taiwan. Specifically, I was regretting, again, we’d never said goodbye—we hung out for a night with this non-English-speaking, fashionably-crimped-haired guy at this resort town in the middle of nowhere, communicating via the miraculous ice-breaking powers of whiskey and karaoke, but then we never saw him again. Well, we never saw him after 9 am, when he came by, haggard and worn, woke us up, then promised to come back and didn’t. I mention this because I received a mysterious message in my inbox today, almost entirely in Chinese (excluding the greeting: “Jennifer how are you”), which I had to decipher with the help of Google Translator. I can still only recognize about 5 Chinese characters. I’m not entirely sure who it’s from, still, but I can’t imagine anyone else I met writing me in Chinese. I’m hopeful.
The one other piece of news is that I’m home alone with host dad, which is AWKWARD. We’ve always been a little weird with each other, and the male-female dynamic only complicates things. I’m sure I’m supposed to be fixing him dinner, but he beats me to it every time! I try to compensate by doing the dishes. Hopefully I won’t be kicked out of my homestay for neglecting my womanly duties!