A D-train Passenger Views Outside :: Land Beauty Essays

A D-train Passenger Views Outside The passenger realizes as the light of the sunset passes through the gaps in the skyscrapers that what he sees is good. The glittering reddish sky slowly disappears as the clouds fly; the train descends as the view passes by into the darkness of the underground. It is a scene most of us will encounter if we ever take the New York subway over the Manhattan Bridge at sunset. Many times I have seen this panorama, but it still does not fail to capture me, to draw me away from my book, and to the window. Then while the bridge-columns flash by the windows, in the gaps, like an old movie, the view unrolls in all its beauty. How did our ancient ancestors feel when they saw this spectacular sight? (I mean the â€Å"ancient† of a few decades ago.) I really can’t tell you, because I never was an ancient, and if I saw one, that is not one of the topics that we discussed. But I can tell you how a very intelligent modern man thinks of it. (That would be me. I am also very humble.) I feel that it is a wondrous sight, if you think about it. But only if you think about it. A being less cultured, in a specific way, would not regard the sight as beautiful, inspiring, wondrous, exalting or stupefying. He probably would not even know if those word s exist. He would probably say that it is, well, big. To him it is not necessarily beautiful. We can only understand that it must be beautiful since so much work was put into it, so many people contributed to it and built it, so many breakthroughs had to be achieved prior to the conception, that this site is the culmination of the millennia of human history and science that came before it. Now isn’t that inspiring? (It sure sounds inspiring if you ask me. It even has some pretty long words, so it better be inspiring.) I look at the unfolding view and, subliminally, I think of all the things mentioned above, and only then do I consider the view beautiful. The aforementioned â€Å"uncultured† being looks at it, and finds it â€Å"big†. In his essay â€Å"A First American Views His Land†, N. Scott Momaday tried to express the beauty of that land that he lived in, and the feelings he personally, and Native Americans in general, had toward that land.