A flashback from years ago

It was my last day in college. I had finished my final final, and was in the library waiting for a friend to go celebrate.

The Periodic Table of Element

There was a copy of a Chemistry text book on the table, open to the Periodic Table of the Elements. I began to stare at it, transfixed. It was the first illustration in a textbook I did not have to memorize or be tested on. For the first time I was free to think, ‘What immortal hand or eye conceived such awe-filled symmetry?’

The apparent chaos of Beethoven’s handwritten manuscript for the sublime Ode to Joy.

Then in another room, someone put on a record. It was the final movement of Beethoven’s final symphony: The Ode to Joy. And suddenly, the order of the Table, and the ecstacy of the music, came together in my mind, and I realized with a shock that I had wasted 16 years of my life in classrooms. Nothing in all those years came close to this sense of all-in-all.

A week later, I ran away to sea.

© 2022 Thomas Mahon