Something the other day reminded me of the stanza from The Ancient Mariner:
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
I remember the force of these words the first time I read them; they perfectly captured a feeling I had so much of the time, of some impending horror, annihilation nipping at my heels. And someone else knew; someone else experienced the same hideous feeling. Coleridge, himself a tormented soul, causing me to gasp in recognition two hundred years later.
I often think that, while words are what we have in common, there are few things that have the individual and particular resonances a word does. Dictionaries carve definitions in stone but what a word suggests to me, the resonance it has for me, its many connotations are strictly my own. Some of them are even unknown to me, an atmosphere, a shadow moving so quickly across my consciousness that I have only the dimmest sense of it, can't grasp it, even though -- and this is important -- it leaves behind an effect, additional information, an alteration in my thought. Sometimes, that shadow of a thought will over time emerge more clearly; something new will happen and I'll think of yes I knew that -- I just didn't know quite yet that I knew.
Coleridge's words didn't need to seep in or wait to become more clear - I knew in a moment that here was someone who felt just what I did. And who said it so simply, so clearly that two hundred years later another human being felt his existence, felt it at the core.
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