Still, the coffee is good, the sleep was restful, and the sun is rising in the East. It is cold and a monochromatic scene of dark trees, black rocks, a spare field of dark grass. Life is on the wane. But a bold orange light breaks across the sky. A winter's day in February.
I have been reading Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein; Or the Modern Prometheus" (1818). Everyone knows the story, but it is the language of Mary Shelley that really transports the reader. It is a "Romantic" novel, as in a prime example of the Romanticism or Romantic Movement ascendent in literature and culture in the 1800's.
What really comes forward in all the descriptive language is the love, and the transcendent beauty of Nature. It is almost a religious experience, just being alive in the Natural world. So vivid; the mountains, the forests, the rivers, the oceans, the sun, the moon, the stars. A novel bounded by the bounty and beauty Nature.
That understanding and experience is something that seems lost today. So much of our lives are cut off from the beauty around us. Then there is "the Monster," an ill-made being, created by a man of science, a being immediately rejected & exiled from community, ugly, scary and unwanted. The Monster, articulate and intelligent, only wants to be loved, to be embraced, to be comforted, but is met with horror and violence at every turn. The Monster does monstrous things by accident, and out of lonliness & misunderstanding.
I suppose it's also a novel that shows the calamities of trying to cheat death. What Monsters do we become when we are out of tune with Nature? It is extraordinary novel. First conjured up by a young woman on a weekend of ghost stories told by Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori (The Vampyre).
It is a transporting experience. Haunting. Otherwordly. A beautiful example of the Human Imagination unleashed. There is the vivid sense that Humans who feel madly, deeply, purely, see more of Life & know more too. A picture of another time and place. So very, very Human. Alive now too.
