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in Central Parkreaching for the gold ring. Te depiction includes Holden’s
reactiona joyous responsesomething that cannot be accounted for logically
or through an examination of motive: “I felt so happy all of a suddenthe way
old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawlingI felt so
happyif you want to know the truth.” In its way this is our recent literature’s
most memorable equivalent of Wordsworth’s great awakening scenes: the
discovery of joy and heightened understanding and the capacity for close
identifcation with others who are experiencing instinctual pleasure or fulfll-
ment or satisfactory endurance. “By our spirits are we deifed” Wordsworth
put it. Te awakening is like John Stuart Mill’s famous recognition scene in
his Autobiography: Mill’s own depression lifted when he discovered the inner
sense of Wordsworth’s poetry. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine
for my state of mind was that they expressednot mere outward beautybut
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states of feelingand of thought colored by feelingunder the excitement of
beauty.” Hard as it is to think of human feeling as a news item at the turn
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