I've been attempting to consume more writings by the Romantics, it's a neglected period of European, and in more particular terms, English, writing—by this meaning that curricula needs must perhaps focus on Enlightenment the Modernism. much of it is surprisingly thorough and soulful inspections of metaphysics-as-it-approaches-the-physical. I love mentions of animus and longing, of goodness, greatness, and depth—the Romantics made headway in understanding these things, which were then thoroughly destroyed by the modernists, and now mocked. or that is how the culture is taught, but there is truth in the words that even as a fairly well-educated man, I had never considered.

this is an excerpt from Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, which I have been struggling with the past few days.

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

at first read I could not follow the words at all; music in the background, thought lucid but fairly confused, moving at a pace too excited by stimulus to inspect the words. I made it some ways through the poem without any sort of meaning reaching me, accepting the nice words and letting the timbre and weight and muscle and sinew of the poem wash over me, but anything higher—or deeper—escaped me.

the image of being alone in a silent room, and your only companion being the fire, is beautiful, of course, and immediately evokes that dichotomy of creation and destruction of flame, the Sun's life-giving and a wildfire's wrath. but in the same breath he evokes this terribly lonely idea of the Spirit. I say lonely because it is apart from him, and in my reading, yearning for meaning. Spirit seeks an echo or mirror, it seeks a confidant and connection, an identity it can recognise—something we lack. it was imagined, perhaps, that by removing the spirit from man, or at least stripping it of its primary importance, that we would no longer have this dysfunction. the common refrain of those conscious people racked by postmodernism—some call themselves metamodernists—is that we have had meaning stripped from us, and only the last few generations have done, and it has been gradual, and now we are so isolated from history and people and spirit, and so connected globally and blurred to one entity, that we have become dysfunctional.

this is on my mind often, though it was the end of the excerpt that stopped me in my second reading. in the presuppositionally and propositionally rational world we have no choice but to inhabit, Thought cannot be mocked. not until we reach the very edges of the postmodern do we find those who deny thought its emphasis. in fact the mainstream of the new science movement deifies thought in an almost unsettling way. but in this, Coleridge writes that in searching for meaning, the Spirit makes a toy of Thought. that is my reading of it. and this sent a chill down my spine.

earnestly, Elliot

we don't go from ignorant childhood to adult individualism, we go from wild child to a disciplined adulthood. we have to make ourselves slaves to our disciplines, and these are cultural, national or racial; all have differing levels of clarity and justifiability; all cannot be true at the same time. I'm not sure I know the question that follows this revelation; I know that Nietzsche ended his investigation shortly after bringing this to a civilisational level;

how are we to live when God is dead?

in bringing the revelation to this level, it becomes (certainly for me) impossible to tackle. he famously prophesied that we must either drift toward nihilism or totalitarianism without God. now it certainly seems that the culture we inhabit has fallen very close to nihilism, as in the middle of the last century we fell sway to totalitarianism and it left such a scar, such a terrible taste in the mouth, that any step towards that direction again has become impossible, and so the slippery slope in the other direction, that heedless crashing towards liberty in itself, which every method of thought, every religion, every ideology, has warned against; has become synonymous with the good.

the limping, tragic figure of the culture we inhabit is open to searing critique from within, and joyfully, and open to existential threats from without, and blindly. if Nietzsche was correct, then it seems we've chosen nihilism on a civilisational level. diagnosis is vulgar, vapid and on the whole unhelpful—it is made of the same spirit as anarchic revolutions which have no solution at the other side.

so instead I can try to focus on just what it means for the individual. I don't know the answer to this question either. how can cultural norms affect an individual? isn't it paradoxical, or at least offensively generic, to be able to investigate an individual by the cultural norms? but clarity of being requires that we do just that, or at least live as though we do. the distinction between people has necessarily become clearer in society as it becomes more diverse. in perhaps its most obvious forms it's the unfeeling nature of perusing foreign news;

I receive BBC Breaking News Twitter notifications. I will read many killed and wounded in explosion in... and my heart will race, but then I'll read Mosul, or eastern China, and I'll almost automatically swipe the notification away. the constant bombardment of news that one is expected to undertake on a daily basis so as to remain up-to-date, is partly to blame—we have only enough minutes in the day to mourn—but if it's twenty-two dead in Manchester, it can affect me for days.

we've been thrust into an uncaring world, goes the cynical and overplayed idea, and brought up by people who barely even know themselves, but then we're taught that to look to the future means destroying the past. I wonder if the ramblings of my millennial peers are just the sensationalism of youth; reactionary views in those who will grow out of them. I'm in two minds, as a conflict within my generation between the alt-right and the communist youth would probably be quite productive.

earnestly, Elliot