Define ‘awestruck’, she asked them. They stared at her, resolved to fill the air with a dumbfounded sort of silence (which is almost the same thing but not quite as profound) as she steadily met their gazes, allowing them to search her frame for any betrayal of that daring countenance she bore as regally as though it were a crown.
And just what did those probing pairs upon pairs of eyes find? I cannot speak for any pair save my own (I was, by default as a student to the lecturer, part of that fore-mentioned ‘they’), so this is whom my eyes met: A lady, around the age of 25. her hair fell like sighing grain that yearns for the support of a shoulder- just out of reach. Her neck held up that grain-framed face with poise and when she unlocked those coffre-fort lips to speak, her palms would spontaneously drift to elbow level and turn upwards, as if in worship of her subject. Her subject was poetry.
She answered her question like she was delivering a ration of some long-kept secret; to be awestruck, she said, is to be silenced because of an overwhelming feeling that follows having directly been exposed to grandeur.
My mind, as party to the reception of those words, tripped, then raced, then soared. I felt as though revelation had just taken place without so much as a ceremonious “How-do-you-do?” and I was left wrestling with how best to phrase this one experience of beauty.
This then is how I processed that experience: I derive beauty from hearing her definition of awestruck. The word itself is not particularly beautiful, but the exposition of what it could mean, is. Awestruck is the description of a reaction- a reaction to grandeur. The potential of grandeur to be beautiful, is truly what I find beautiful and perhaps what it stands in contrast to; the possibility of never actually achieving that potential. The fragility of balance in that conflict is beautiful too, is it not?
I chose to write about this gem that passed- almost unseen- with those sand grains that separate our pasts from the rest of time, because I thought I owed it to that ever-growing cycle of experiential beauty.
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