Looking Outside the Body. . . Final Blog

I like to think of our study abroad trip to Switzerland as a reenactment. As we followed the same steps as the Romantic writers and poets, we seemed to be mimicking their same discovery. Since our group has been one of the first, if not the first to study abroad in Switzerland from Western Kentucky University, I see us all as pioneers. Like the romantics we had to see both faces of the Alps. Through our study we saw the Alps as both a healing entity and cruel destiny. C.F. Ramuz painted the mountains in dark words and stressed the cruelness of the mountains and hostility of nature. However, Johanna Spyri emphasized the healing power of the Alps in the classic, Heidi. Writers of the Alps went through individual journeys in discovering the sublime. What is sublime to one is not to someone else. According to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant our mind and how it is raised says what is sublime. This is the same journey we took on ourselves. Discovering ourselves through our relationship with nature and the power to transport ourselves out of the norm. Part of what made up the Romantic writers was the need to search for the sublime and understanding, analyzing, and critiquing the surroundings in order to put together the pieces to larger questions.
Our relationship with the mountains can be haunting and full filling. The experience we have had over the past three weeks was about making connections. One cannot understand themselves until they leave their normal environment. This is the tradition the Romantic writers began. Their writing began the tourism tradition in the Alps and took some fear out of the mountains. Yet the madness continues. We continue to make expeditions to try to understand nature and massive mountains. With the hopes of understanding the other, one feels that they can better understand themselves. This tradition continues like the tradition of writing. We build off of the writers we read; we continue the conversations. We answer questions, and then we state a dozen more. But it is this cycle that makes us crazy and makes us sane. We continue to write and read, study and travel. We are human and must look outside the body.