![\"Qulaia_main\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Qulaia_main.jpg\")
<\/a>Maine\u2019s breezy coast aside (we used to be called \u201cthe nation\u2019s air-conditioner\u201d), what makes vacationers return to us year after year?<\/p>\nBar none, Maine has the best qualia.<\/p>\n
The smell of fresh-roasted coffee mixed with the tang of salt air on Commercial Street is a quale (the singular form of qualia). A friend chimes in: \u201cThat first bite of a lobster dredged in butter while you\u2019re sitting at the Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound, enveloped in the steam of more lobsters being prepared all around me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Being awakened by the eardrum vibration of the screams of gulls, almost but not quite human, over Ragged Island in Harpswell.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a quick dazzle, an \u201cirreducible\u201d experience so powerful, singular, and exact it\u2019s difficult to improve on it with further description.<\/p>\n
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/em> ticks off \u201cthe feel of sandpaper,\u201d \u201cthe smell of skunk,\u201d and \u201cthe sight of bright purple.\u201d Then there\u2019s Australian philosopher Frank Cameron Jackson\u2019s example of \u201cMary, the brilliant color scientist\u2026imprisoned in a black and white room…\u201dAfter years of study, she becomes a world expert on colors without ever having seen them.<\/p>\n \u201cOne day her captors release her…She steps outside her room into a garden full of flowers. \u2018So, that is what it is like to experience red,\u2019 she exclaims as she sees a red rose. \u2018And that,\u2019 she adds, looking down at the grass, \u2018is what it is like to experience green.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Imagine the sensory overload going from never having seen Maine before (no matter how much you\u2019ve read about it) to seeing Maine.<\/p>\n It\u2019s what brought Thoreau here. The crack of a dead branch while you walk for the first time along the Allagash River. The crash of a fawn as he jumps right ahead of you.<\/p>\n The exquisite stink of low tide.<\/p>\n All the jazz about a white Christmas is about qualia. David Lodge cites this passage from Anne Michaels\u2019s Fugitive Pieces<\/i>: \u201cThe winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it\u2019s very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights.\u201d<\/p>\n The locking and unlocking sound of oars as a single shell slips across the mist of Highland Lake.<\/p>\n The cry of a loon.<\/p>\n Not that Maine is the exclusive domain of qualia. Charmingly, Virgil tries to describe a pear to Beatrice, who\u2019s never tasted one, in Yann Martel\u2019s novel Beatrice and Virgil<\/em>. And who doesn\u2019t love Gary Snyder\u2019s \u201cMid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout\u201d?<\/p>\n Down valley a smoke haze<\/em> I cannot remember things I once read<\/em>
\n Three days heat, after five days rain<\/em>
\n Pitch glows on the fir-cones<\/em>
\n Across rocks and meadows<\/em>
\n Swarms of new flies.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n A few friends, but they are in cities.<\/em>
\n Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup<\/em>
\n Looking down for miles<\/em>
\n Through high still air.<\/em><\/p>\n