the fact that it divides us should be enough to unite us

-Listening to "Girl from the North Country" by Bob Dylan really seizes me. Something about the melody, how he ends each line so powerfully, it's hard to explain but it makes my eyes burn a little bit and I have to close them and just listen to it, and breathe only during the parts when he isn't singing. 

-Does this qualify as a hyperkulturemic experience? I think that perhaps I have experienced this many times. So many times! I couldn't believe it when I read it, I just love it when my absract thoughts are given scientific definitions (like synaesthesia, for instance).

-I experienced this feeling once at the Louvre in Paris on a Europe trip that I took with my parents in the summer of 2005. I remember it so well. I was looking at the old Renaissance paintings, and this one in particular really floored me. It was Delaroche's "La Jeune Martyre" (The Young Martyr). There was something about the way the water was painted, white moonlight on the waves, the way the water was transparent- it was so real. And it was so huge, so much bigger than me. I was devastated by it...I had to stand there for at least ten minutes before I could even bring myself to move.

-Stendhal actually wrote about this hyperkulturemia in the context of tourists looking at Renaissance paintings when visiting Europe, so it was especially interesting for me to read about it. How fascinating it is that I could feel something so precisely similar to something someone felt in 1817.