I've been visiting Pittsburgh's cemeteries for two years now, but I have not seen every ravine and hillside that houses tombs and mausoleums. This week I found the best so far: a round, Gothic mausoleum that looks like a set for Poe's "Ulalume." It's in Allegheny Cemetery near the Bloomfield entrance.
Breakthrough moments in human consciousness. Plotinus describes
achieving oneness with nature/God/the Sublime (substitute your own
overarching noun): "He was one himself
then, with no distinction in him either in relation to himself or
anything else; for there was no movement in him, and he had no emotion,
no desire for anything else when he had made the ascent, no reason or
thought; his own self was not there for him, if we should say even this.
He was as if carried away or possessed by a god, in a quiet solitude,
in the stillness of his being turning away to nothing and not busy about
himself, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest." My first
moment like this was experienced at night, leaning against a great
maple tree in Edinboro graveyard, after I had entered into the very
essence of the tree itself (imagining myself as it, not me as one
looking at it) .... another time in Providence late at night in the
woods as a family of raccoons and I sat regarding the stars ... a few
times, not enough times, in a lifetime. To attempt to describe such
moments, and to give them value in everyday life, is a poet's life's
work.
