🦋 There is no such concept as a thing in itself!
We can sing beneath his window, "We know what is wrong with your system....There is no place in it, no place for love." I seem to have a poor memory for schools of thought. Like right now I am reading The Blue Flower, about the life of German Romantic poet Novalis; and I find that I can summon up only a very hazy memory of the history of German Romanticism, which I know I studied in two classes in college; and furthermore that I don't even really know what kind of thinking "Romanticism" is. (I think it must be similar to "Idealism" which I have a little bit of a handle on, but I'm not sure how they differ.*) I remember when I was 18, that my sort-of-mentor Jim Higgs told me I was a romantic thinker, and that I read some Romantics to try and grasp what he was telling me about myself. But if I ever was successful in that it has escaped me in the meantime. So probably I should school myself a bit in the meanings of terms, as I approach this book. The book seems like a lot of fun. I am liking the descriptions of Friedrich's family and school life, and nodding and smiling with recognition at certain passages -- notably the youthful Fritz's insistence that "the body is not flesh, but the same stuff as the soul," and later his statement to Schlegel that "the golden age would return, and that there was nothing evil in the world."
*Interestingly Novalis is the top hit that comes back from a Wiki search for "Romantic idealism"...
posted evening of Sunday, October 14th, 2007
➳ More posts about The Blue Flower
➳ More posts about Penelope Fitzgerald
➳ More posts about Readings
The Blue Flower is a wonderful book; it hooked me right on
the first page, with the amazing description of "the washday":
"He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here, at
the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse, he could tell from the great
dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillow-cases, bolster-cases, vests,
bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard, where
grave-looking servants, both men and women, were receiving them
into giant baskets, that they washed only once a year..."
There's a nice Wikipedia entry on the "blue
flower" concept.
posted afternoon of October 17th, 2007 by language hat
Thanks. Hm, something about my software seems to be stripping out
<a tags -- the url LH posts is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Flower
posted afternoon of October 17th, 2007 by Jeremy
I just realized what poet Novalis' Hymns to the Night reminds me of,
which is Blake. And "Oh yeah, of course... Romantic..." so I'm
beginning to connect the dots a little in my head...
posted afternoon of October 21st, 2007 by Jeremy
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