On being a romantic

The other day the guy who sits across from me at work, who has a photo of a waratah in a forest as his current desktop, was rambling on about how he had this indescribable “thing” for waratahs, perhaps because he had never seen one in the wild. So, I started to ramble back to him about how, in his longing after the waratah, he was perhaps a votary of the blue flower (after the character in Novalis), only it was a red flower. He may or may not have been thinking I was something of a fruit nut, so I had to bring Batman into it to explain.

This reminded me of the Romantic movement, and how I had at home, as yet unread, Alain de Botton’s book called The Romantic Movement, which was going to be like my dummies introduction to it. Then, I was messing about going along a shelf of my books, like a kid with a new toy, holding their barcodes up to my phone so my Book Catalogue app could read them in, when I came across said book. So, I pulled it, freshly catalogued, off the shelf and read the introduction. It was so amusing, and told the story of a girl called Alice, who red-facedly reminded me a little of this girl called Ali that I know (though this reminder diminished after the first few pages), that I found myself flicking through the pages, even though I am already reading a couple of other books right now. Here are are a few snippets from this book. You can hear the echoes of Sehnsucht and Unheimlichkeit running through them. :

From later in the Introduction:

To take D. H. Lawrence’s definition, she was a Romantic in being ‘homesick for somewhere else’, another body, another country, another lover – the echo of the adolescent Rimbaud’s celebrated ‘la vie est ailleurs’*. But from where did this sickness, if one may call such longing for otherness a sickness, arise? She was no fool, she had dipped into the great books and theories, she had learnt that God was dead and Man [that other anachronism] was on his last legs as an embodiment of an answer to Life, she knew one was expected to call stories with happy endings and contented heroines trash fantasy and not literature. Yet, perhaps because she retained an appetite for soap operas and songs whose soaring refrain sang of wanting to,

Hold you, oh yeah, and love you baby,

I said and love you baby,

she was still waiting [by the phone or otherwise] for salvation to make an appearance.

Then later (pg 21):

Sitting alone eating dinner, Alice longed for a day when, because someone cared for her, she too might experience the sense that the small things about her were appreciated, that, without going to the moon or becoming President, elements of her unextraordinary life could take on a certain value, her loneliness could be alleviated by someone who would say, ‘It’s so sweet the way you ...’ and she could respond likewise. It would be a time when a Sunday evening spent reading the papers with a bowl of soup could avoid its lamentable sadness because there would be someone [not Warhol** perhaps, but someone] there to digest the experience with her.

And in further explanation of the problem of Alice (and personally I think God still does solve the matter) (pg 24):

Perhaps in another age, God had solved such matters. His would have been the eye in heaven, the sordidness of the world would have been alleviated by the sense that He was watching, and that the banal was hence connected to the illustrious history of good and evil. Though believers were in the Earthly City, their actions nevertheless had relevance to what would happen in the Heavenly. God saw everything, even a journey across London on a rainy, foggy night could be rendered bearable by its witness.

But Alice had never believed, and for her it was art and love that were being asked to shoulder some of the same functions. Much as film allowed her to escape a sense of isolation through the thought that ‘I’m not the only one to have experienced this emotion, seen this street, sat in this café ...’ love held out the hope of a being to whom she could whisper, ‘You too feel this? How wonderful. It’s exactly what I thought when ...’ - the contents of one soul finding tender analogy with those of another.

Then I particularly liked this sentence (pg 30):

History had forced her into the camp of the nail-biters rather than the screamers, her life an inner not an outer drama.

* This means 'the life is elsewhere'.

** Warhol painted a soup can, and put the aesthetic back in the ordinary.