It Moves You

            I admit this prompt has made me miserable. I’ve moaned and complained to my roommates, my friends, my parents, to that great black hole known as Facebook. I’ve asked endless hoards of people (okay, maybe three people) what they thought greatness was. All to no avail! And so here I am, hoping to beat this paper out at 1:00 AM the day it’s due.

            All through my high school AP English class we were constantly asked to look for the “theme” of a variety of short stories, books, and poems. My teacher would urge us to find the “human element” of each piece, how the author highlighted a certain bit of humanity. I suppose that’s what made a work great. It was some bit of writing that brought forward some trait all humans had or knew about and expounded on it.

A great work is something that touches the human soul. It resonates inside us, invoking some emotion or memory or recognition. Take Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Inside all of us is both an Elinor and a Marianne. When it comes to love we are sensible and reserved at time, but we can also be wild and romantic. We deal with heartbreaks like Elinor, quiet and suppressed, pretending like all is well. We also deal with them like Marianne: with violent fits of sorrow, selfishly throwing our disquiet into the faces of all those around us. Other times we are yet in the middle. The point is, in reading this “great work,” we see ourselves and those around us.

Music can do the exact same thing. I find that Chopin’s romantic style often invokes a variety of emotions in me. As I learned in Psychology, music is incredibly powerful. It is so easy for the brain to link music with a particular memory, feeling, or thought. As a girl I have ruined many a great song by linking it to a boy who later turned out to not be so great (the use of that particular word was fully intended). I have a CD that was played when I was a child to get me to fall asleep and I find that that music can still knock me right out. Greatness is achieved in music when it can make that sort of lasting influence on an individual or a crowd.

I believe greatness becomes relative to the individual on some level. Crime and Punishment may make you think about your own guilt, but it can also be extraordinarily boring. It may not be great to you, but it is great to someone else. A great work is that book that makes you want to change the world or that song that makes you want to cry or that painting that reminds you of that time you threw spaghetti sauce on the wall and then threw in some melted clocks. They move you.