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[proximoception]

Draw-out question: What makes you tear up (in a good way) to even think about?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Generally just thinking about things doesn't, quite, except private things, things about the kids. But there are certain moments in poems, and sometimes even in not-poems, if we're talking about them, if I'm pressing them on people I trust. The last line of the Iliad, for example. Dollabella's reaction to the messenger from Antony sending him all his treasure, with his bounty overplus. I think there's a huge element of gratitude and that sort of tearing up, for me.

And what does it for you?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

For a while, what had happened with my last complicated relationship. Now, not anything I can think of off the top of my head-- but I read Code Name Verity yesterday and was tearing up in public about it for a couple hours! Worth noting both because it is humorously trivial and weirdly related to the first item.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Wait - you dated a spy?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

What motivated my asking was the end of On the Edge, a Bruce Dern movie from the '80s. It's the single most embarrassing thing that does that to me: he's a marathon runner, and turns back when he's about to win to join hands with those behind him, so that they all cross the line together. I didn't even watch the movie, it was just on while I was doing homework or something and I looked up and caught the scene.

I think I've posted about Turgenev's deathbed letter to Tolstoy, which at least according to Tolstoy seems to have been what gave us Ivan Ilych through Hadji Murad. And about Kepler's dying gestures. Another one from science is how Wallace handled finding out about Darwin.

Probably lots from literature but they're escaping me. Well, Mr. Flood is aptly named.

Clearly I need to finish the Iliad.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

Only two things come to mind.

The first and most reliable is Sinead O'Connor's version of "The Foggy Dew". It had that effect on me when I first heard it as a teenager, and for whatever reason has not diminished.

The second and less explicable thing is thinking about NASA/JPL control rooms when something like a lander has touched down successfully. Big science makes me cry.

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

Transitional moments in music: set pieces (the Meistersinger quintet, Protegga il giusto cielo, Soave sia il vento), music for choirs (the choral "We wander by music's power through darkest night" and "Triumph", the Bergman hell-scape in mind since I first saw it, all of Mendelssohn's, Brahms' and Strauss's songs for unaccompanied voices, male and female choirs), Wagner's "In the greenhouse," Yvonne Keeley singing "If I Had Words," the Misfits' "Hybrid Moments," Lenten hymns, the last movement of the Eroica, between the fugue and the G minor variation. Other things that aren't coming to mind.

Recently, my mom called me up and sent a photo of my 14-year-old cousin, who needs a heart transplant and has been in the hospital since December. Hadn't seen her face since '07, and started breaking down, looking at the photo.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

good punchline! I didn't date her and she wasn't a spy, and the sad ending of the book wasn't anything like our sad ending, but there are just so few stories about intense female friendship and its ability to turn a plot (as opposed to heterosexual romance or romance at all), it really hit me where I live. And now I see I was reading too quickly on my phone and missed the "in a good way" from your post!

I thought of another one! This is more relevant to your original question. For some reason as long as I can remember, thinking about time travel makes me well up! Specifically, a dynamic in stories where someone sees the world around them changing very quickly, in a way they're not part of; one thing changing and one thing staying the same. I can't tell whether it makes me sad or not, just very affected. This is the strangest little emotional kink.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yeah, "years pass" moments are absurdly affecting.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

The Mars landing got a lot of us.

Are you Irish? Or was it something about the singing?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

May she get it. I'll never forget the moment when my father got the call saying there was a kidney.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty song, for sure, but really any song about a sort of doomed bravery is enough to choke me up. In fact there's an otherwise atrocious metal song about the Battle of Wizna which makes me teary when I can stand to listen to it.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I like Cohen's version of The Partisan better than any of his own songs.