Second Year Winner: The Tomb Where Joy Lived

PRWR 2100, Studies in Non-Fiction. Course Director: Chris Morris

Abstract

“The Tomb Where Joy Lived” is a collection of four contemplative and thematically connected short interventions that evocatively connect the genres of science and travel writing. The essay links concepts of passing and remembrance, and contrasts themes of consistency and the fleeting. By acknowledging how the past is always already reverberating in the present, both in the built structures of marble and stone, we see how music and poetry can connect generations and the physical spaces that we inherit and inhabit. The essay offers opportunities to reflect on the meanings and symbols of death, and the way that our built environments “absorb” the ephemeral occupations of human experience, in ways that we expect and others that lull us into awakenings. Through offering a sensorial exposition, the writer invites the reader to occupy a seat at the sacred table of mourning and ceremony, a place that is dominated by the sights and sounds of history lived in crucial yet vulnerable moments.