On Wednesday, we went to a state park, and again, Rhiannon was in my group. Reaching a cliff’s edge after an hour hike, I noticed the fragility of life. With one false step, I could descend back into dust, carried by wind and misted with the water’s current before splitting my head on the rocks. My eyes lingered on the verdant, overhanging cluster of trees and deep brown cliffs surrounding the waterfall. Its contrast struck me—the cliff was silent and still while the water rushed violently and urgently; each moment new water plunged down into the pool below. The wind, birds, and water were all loud, but our voices could not be heard. Rhiannon studied the scene with her back to us. I wondered what was running through her mind while she gazed out. Did she wonder what end she would meet if she stepped over the edge?
The daily walks exhausted me, and I sunk into bed gratefully each night. The nights were getting cooler, and by November, I exchanged my shorts for sweatpants and wool socks. When she was at meals, Rhiannon read poems by the Romantics to our table, but mostly to me. Natasha found Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse” hilarious, especially with the Scottish accent she used. I especially liked Shelley’s “England in 1819”—I admired his fury and snark.
In Euro, as we liked to call it, European Stories, the Romantics wrote, worshipped meandering rivers, and scorned the Enlightenment. If a Romantic landowner had a river on his property, and it was straight, he would hire someone to make it meander, Barnes said. This seemed ridiculous. Hypocritical. If I were a Romantic, I thought, I would live in an old, abandoned barn in the countryside, with a broken-down fence and a winding path up a hill to get there. Vines would creep up the sides, and weeds would grow among blackberries and wild strawberries.
Barnes was right; Rhiannon was well-suited to Romanticism. Of course, she criticized this, too; the focus on the individual was dangerous, they romanticized strife, they were unrealistic. But through her complaints, it was evident she enjoyed Romanticism. Her eyes were glued to the screen when Barnes projected a Blake painting, tracing every muscle in the evil angel’s body and the chain that bound him to some out-of-frame hell.