Romanticism

More recently I feel that kind of impulse steadily eroded, sometimes swamped, by a sense that life and the world are at best meaningless, at worst sordid.

Sorry, I can just see this going the way of "Formalism", i.e. three people who know what's being talked about talking, and twenty others nervously please-sirring their hands up.

I'm a small-r romantic in that I'd like more people to fall in love with me. Actually no, that's probably something else.

To me...investing things with more significance and meaning than they might actually have. Constructing and believing myths in order to make the world less ordinary and plain. Obvious example: Wordsworth and co. seeing more in a landscape than just...soil & vegetation.

I've always found this way of looking at Romanticism useful, since I think it created some powerful myths that people still adhere to, whether they realize it or not. There is a *lot* of Romanticism in music, for example, particularly Rock. As a big-time skeptic, I would have to say I'm most definitely anti-Romantic. Romanticism to me is about escapism, turning away from self-awareness, sort of resigning oneself as subject to irrational, mysterious forces. The Romantics I've encountered seem to be people who refuse to *articulate*. Literacy is so precious to me - it's something to which so many people have no or limited access, so I tend to see Romanticism as something spoiled children do. If I had to accept that my moods and attitudes are the product of unknowable forces, I'd throw myself off a building, so NO. Sentimentality and nostalgia, however, are other matters....I think you can indulge in those things and still keep your wits about you.

Shit, here comes another Smiths song...

I can give it more time now, and sometimes it calls me. However, I find that whenever I give into that kind of pull I become much less happy on a personal level, and I can even catch myself making quite divisive, isolationist statements, because that is what unchecked Romanticism drives to you: a denial of, and anger at, the way other people choose to live their lives.

Therefore, I find Romanticism a tantalising concept, but I tend to avoid it for the sake of my own sanity.

"I would not now use this word to describe the experience which is central in this book. I woul dnot, indeed, use it to describe anything, for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banishes from our vocabulary." His categories, nonetheless: 1) Love affair romance
2) stories about dangerous adventure, especially in the past or faraway places
3) Miraculous things that are not part of your religion (thus nymphs are more romantic than angels)
4) melodramatic things
5) morbid things
6) egoism and subjectivism (I don't understand what he means by this one though)
7) love of nature
8) revolt against current civilization and culture

I am a Romantic in the sense of fascination by numbers two, three, and often seven.

Take as an example Shelley's "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert." Contrary to Shelley's startling assertion, a skylark is and has always been a bird. Read the entire poem and you will not find any 'true' information about skylarks, only grandiosity, empty flourishes, shameless exaggeration, and rhetorical mumbo-jumbo that treats the skylark - a beautiful creature fully worthy of our full attention - only as a vessel for the author's self-absorbed blathering.

This is, in my view, is the sin of romanticism. It can be written by feeling alone and does not stoop to employ either knowledge or experience as the basis for its content.

Thirteen years have past; thirteen summers, with the length
Of thirteen winters! and again I read
These posts, sent in from dim rooms' screens
With soft inward mutters.

Yes I consider myself a romantic but I think it's more helpful to apply these tendencies to the creation of art (writing, music, etc). Applying romanticism to relationships is a slippery slope to lead to feeling semi-mental. For example, I was very much into making mixes for my last partner which she loved, but these mixes took out huge slices of my time and eventually my sanity, and now when I meet someone new, I put the brakes on being overly thoughtful.