Intermission: But Was Narcissus At Least Beautiful?
"We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in art."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“When Narcissus died the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.”
I was struck by the image of a painting—that of an older painting, that of a famous painting, that of a painting which I had forgotten about, but at that moment, flawed everything I was—as if the string of memories was pulled taught again, and I could pluck one from its sheath.
The painting itself was less significant to me, insofar as it inspired, like an old childhood toy recovered from dust, the visage of Oscar Wilde: my first and final teacher of literary experience. Whatever he has instilled, I have kept in my heart; whatever he has instructed, I have imitated, such that the old habit is resisted while writing about him. Otherwise I may imitate his style unconsciously, as I consciously did, on Sabbath mornings with coffee mist in the sunlight, and a wooden table with open poetry and opened novels and black ink for private writings, under the protectorates of Hawkins and Reinhardt, and the wind and the sun. Back then, writing was a sacred seance, and this painting, The Death of Chatterton (1856) by the Pre-Raphaelite, Henry Wallis, evokes again that golden ambition of final youth.
In other words, I am reminded of how Romantics have not abandoned me; or rather, how the literary tradition of eternal John Keats has underlaid a spiritual entirety onto my inner life, which has survived the peregrinations of years, and which remains in my thoughts as the core of my spirit, even if I write differently now. But in this regard, I remain positively Victorian; the headiness of the Modernists does not move me, the despair of the Postmodernists cannot turn me, but I am still shaken to life by the sheer and vital life of the Romantics, or that infinite smallness of the human heart, which encapsulates every movement before and every movement since, and which cannot be moved except by the motions of the smallest beauty in this human lifeworld.
This essay is a dance with Wilde: an oscillation between master and student, between the undead and the living. There is something here I must divvy, because in my history with Wilde is the sensibility of myself, which I seek to encounter and observe with my fingers to the sun, so that I may codify in my own language myself. And his first and dire lesson has not dissolved: a literary countenance is infinitely more important than any book of rules, such that it is not the rules of art which you must first learn, but a philosophy of art which gives such rules sense—this sensibility has followed me since.
As Wilde explained in his 1882 lecture, The English Renaissance Of Art, “And yet the truths of art cannot be taught: they are revealed only, revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful impressions by the study and worship of all beautiful things.”
And there is the impression I have kept as a sensibility: I want to live beautifully and to venerate beauty in everything, because that is the secret to life, as Wilde says. And to be austere and beautiful, like a source of wind and light entering a window, sweeping into the soul of a child and filling them with a lifetime of happy tears and impossible worlds, and damning them to desire sharing it with others, I feel that this child follows divinity into adulthood—an adulthood that is often followed by the loss of the divine.
I feel that women could always be goddesses—life does not wear them down in the same way as men. Even the most wretched woman could be worshipped, because a woman will always retain some aspect of her divinity, such that there is always something to worship or adore of her. And if she chose to, she could always reveal such divinity again, like Venus out of the sea. But it is possible for a man to become wholly mortal, or to become more than wretched: he becomes despicable when his loss of divinity is mirrored with his loss to give love or to surrender himself to the first instinct to receive love. When he becomes a coward incapable of receiving or giving, and lives so miserably and thus ordinarily, he forgets the aspect of the divine he once embodied in his youth, which Wilde summarises for the Pre-Raphaelites as “youth, power and enthusiasm”—or in my own words: that desire for more than this earthly life, and the power to become more than yourself, to become more than human, to become almost like God out of the old mythology.
As Wilde remarked on the subject, “And of such love I think that the abiding presence in our houses of noble imaginative work would be the surest seed and preparation. I do not mean merely as regards that direct literary expression of art by which, from the little red-and-black cruse of oil or wine, a Greek boy could learn of the lionlike splendour of Achilles, of the strength of Hector and the beauty of Paris and the wonder of Helen, long before he stood and listened in crowded market-place or in theatre of marble; or by which an Italian child of the fifteenth century could know of the chastity of Lucrece and the death of Camilla from carven doorway and from painted chest. For the good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it. Its real influence will be in giving the mind that enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of common life for us—whether it be by giving the most spiritual interpretation of one’s own moments of highest passion or the most sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed from sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination for their own sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things. For he who does not love art in all things does not love it at all, and he who does not need art in all things does not need it at all.”
To love beauty is to become beautiful; to chase a beautiful life is already to live one; and it reflects in every love for every object, person and dream one encounters; in the smallest gestures, it reveals itself by the flickering of the eye, by the touching of a body, and the basking of a moment in the wind and the sun, such that art inspires us to more and more: it sensitises us continually to new ways to live and to die, to feel and to feel fear, to enjoy and to hate, and to want and to desire and to want to become.
In this way, art is the blessing of that which we cannot know: lives beyond this one life, and impossibilities which we will never live in the circumstances of places and people we cannot reach, and yet who reach out to us by way of art, such that we might cry out that I can understand you, I can understand you, old master and my friend, for whom time and place bears no barrier, and let me embrace you like I would eternity, because you left behind this aspect of yourself for me, and for people like me and you, who will keep appearing again and again for the rest of time.
As Wilde further explains, “Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the early Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to the facile abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism of imagination, a more careful realism of technique, a vision at once more fervent and more vivid, an individuality more intimate and more intense. For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the aesthetic demands of its age: there must be also about it, if it is to affect us with any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality, an individuality remote from that of ordinary men, and coming near to us only by virtue of a certain newness and wonder in the work, and through channels whose very strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome. La personalité, said one of the greatest of modern French critics, voilà ce qui nous sauvera.”
It was the French novelist, Emile Zola, who wrote in his 1893 book, Les Romanciers Naturalistes, the full passage “L'amour de la personnalité, voilà ce qui nous sauvera, je l'espère. Quand on établira le bilan de notre âge, il y aura bien du fatras à mettre de côté. Les bagages de vingt et trente volumes se réduiront peut- être à quelques pages. Mais on trouvera, au fond de cette production affolée, une belle activité artistique, une poussée superbe de tempéraments puissants. Et ceux qui toucheront encore les générations futures seront ceux-là qui auront senti par eux-mêmes et traduit une sensation nouvelle. Quant aux autres, à ceux qui profitent avec plus ou moins d'habileté des procédés à la mode, ils sont certains de mourir tout entiers, car ils n'auront que parlé le jargon courant, sans l'animer jamais du souffle vivant d'une personnalité.”
Or in my English, “Love of personality is what will save us, I hope. When we take stock of our age, there will be much junk to put aside. The baggage of twenty and thirty volumes will perhaps be reduced to a few pages. But one will find, at the bottom of this frantic production, a beautiful artistic activity, a superb push of powerful temperaments. And those who will still touch the future generations will be those who will have felt by themselves and translated a new sensation. As for the others, those who take advantage with more or less skill of the fashionable processes, they are sure to die entirely, because they will have only spoken the current jargon, without ever animating it with the living breath of a personality.
And it was clearer to me, when I was younger and not simpler, that the mere study of literature is not enough; sometimes, a literary education is an anthropological one, a sociological one, a historiographical one, but rarer it can be a psychological one, and the rarest forms of psychology still: the study of how to silhouette one’s own soul.
My love of English literature is therefore not love for the English; my love of Greek mythology is not love for the Greeks; my love is for the souls of John Keats and William Blake and for the imaginary souls of Athena and Odysseus. My love is not for a culture but for individuals out of a culture; such is the fraternal love between human beings out of time, across time, and within time as contained within their works, their worlds, their lives, and preserved in words, in symbols and in their dreams, which become like our dreams of Keats and Wilde—and of Borges?
The original sin was not our partaking of the fruit of knowledge but our forgoing of Eden for it—because Eden was beautiful and everything beautiful is a return to it. The study of literature and art is therefore the study of exceptional personalities; it is the study of redemption, of courage, of the heroic attempt by individuals to reclaim our lost and collective sense of beauty from the beginning of time—that is the ultimate heroism of art, but there is also a quiet heroism in every small gesture of beauty.
So, make your small pots, your canvases and your sketches; write your poems, your books, and your diaries full of words; or gaze, gaze, and gaze and celebrate what is most beautiful: that you can make something beautiful too, like a sliver of Eden, recaptured in the ghostly vistas of the surfaces of this Earth.
“And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, 'We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.'“
As Wilde continued in his lecture, “The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake, is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. 'Great inventors in all ages knew this - Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are known by this and by this alone'; and another time he wrote, with all the simple directness of nineteenth-century prose, 'to generalise is to be an idiot.' And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus.”
For instance, the cutting word or the cutting line is what cuts deeper than the blade; in a poem or a passage, the great author will leave a series of singular words or phrases, and more than other phrases and words, these cut and cut deeply, with such lethality, that one is bled out and dies in each encounter with them, and immediately, one is reborn with a new sense of things, of words and their power, such that their old self could have committed nothing but resurrection as a response. In another way, you cannot teach these things with a book of rules; you cannot instruct a greatness which approaches from the heart and which exits out the other side; it is a sensibility everyone is born with, although a few can instinctively draw, and much less become artists or artistic from.
As Wilde later spoke in his 1883 lecture, Lecture To Art Students, “Nor is there any such thing as a school of art even. There are merely artists, that is all. And as regards histories of art, they are quite valueless to you unless you are seeking the ostentatious oblivion of an art professorship. It is of no use to you to know the date of Perugino or the birthplace of Salvator Rosa: all that you should learn about art is to know a good picture when you see it, and a bad picture when you see it. As regards the date of the artist, all good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez—they are always modern, always of our time. And as regards the nationality of the artist, art is not national but universal. […] All good art, as I said before, has nothing to do with any particular century; but this universality is the quality of the work of art; the conditions that produce that quality are different. And what, I think, you should do is to realise completely your age in order completely to abstract yourself from it; remembering that if you are an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century, but the master of eternity, that all art rests on a principle, and that mere temporal considerations are no principle at all; and that those who advise you to make your art representative of the nineteenth century are advising you to produce an art which your children, when you have them, will think old-fashioned. But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. […] But remember that there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception. There is no golden age of art; only artists who have produced what is more golden than gold.”
A sensibility is what unites artists; and the greatness of art is also defined by the greatness of its audience, because we are together engaged in a sheer act of humanity: we want to witness the beauty of ourselves and of each other, as revealed in that which science cannot penetrate, but idly gaze at, such as our innate capacities to marvel, to remain awestruck and to be profoundly moved by—magna minima.
In this same lecture, Wilde anticipates the response: “What, you will say to me, the Greeks? were not they an artistic people? Well, the Greeks certainly not, but, perhaps, you mean the Athenians, the citizens of one out of a thousand cities. Do you think that they were an artistic people? Take them even at the time of their highest artistic development, the latter part of the fifth century before Christ, when they had the greatest poets and the greatest artists of the antique world, when the Parthenon rose in loveliness at the bidding of a Phidias, and the philosopher spake of wisdom in the shadow of the painted portico, and tragedy swept in the perfection of pageant and pathos across the marble of the stage. Were they an artistic people then? Not a bit of it. What is an artistic people but a people who love their artists and understand their art? The Athenians could do neither.”
Reading his lectures again, I shoulder them with heart, but there are things which Wilde cannot convince me, like how I disagreed with him at the cemetery in Père Lachaise, and wept my strange tears, when I saw that he would always be alone—a sphinx in the rain—and destitute I sat there with him. And having paid homage to my benefactor, I wholeheartedly adopted his lineage and lachrymose country as my own.
But I cannot agree, for instance, that the presence of technique is an affront to completion, but I agree that grace must be maintained; for example, I cannot agree that politics must be divided from art, but I agree that if it commingles, it must sublimate its own politics; and I disagree that art is for the artists, or for its own sake, but instead that it must embrace everyone, because everyone wants to return to Eden.
In The English Renaissance Of Art (1882), he elaborates on the principles of universality and eternity, “Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For to the poet all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable. The steam whistle will not affright him nor the flutes of Arcadia weary him: for him there is but one time, the artistic moment; but one law, the law of form; but one land, the land of Beauty—a land removed indeed from the real world and yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not from the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm which despair and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of what is accidental and transitory, stripped it of that 'mist of familiarity which makes life obscure to us.'”
And I cannot visit the world in which Wilde lived; I can walk similar streets and not hear the sounds he heard, nor the footsteps he made; I cannot claim to know his mind insofar as I can only imagine from his words; and yet he is eternal and forever, in the same way that Keats is forever, and like how Dante and Blake are forever, and so on and on.
“'But was Narcissus beautiful?' said the pool.”
Sometimes, I dream of smaller hands, as if my hands were not mine; a moment of dysphoria emerges, as if my hands were too large, and my throat was too long and my head too heavy. This body was not always mine; and my memories conflict with the present: I was smaller once and I was smaller for what seemed like a long time, and in any case, I entered this world small.
However, my body is a hoarder’s paradise; in my flesh I have stowed every motion, every touch and every memory. Even if I should forget myself, my body would remember each touch, each injury, each caress, each rage and love. I wish to live a life which would hold no contradiction with itself; so that I might die, as young Chatterton died, above the streets of the world, and die beautifully because I have lived beautifully, and it is this sensibility which aligns me with the poets of old: the shibboleth which edifies the love of beauty to the point of death.
A mountain cannot contemplate itself; it has no measure of its own size, the forests which grow around it, nor the springs which stream from its peaks; for me, the intelligence of human beings is made to contemplate the beautiful, not the scientific. If man travels to the moon, it is to touch its white surface, which for so many years, could only be yearned from afar; a trip to the moon is also a chance to gaze back at the beauty of the Earth from a new perspective—new views of the sublime sphere.
Otherwise, why venture into the unknown if not to seek the beauty within it? Why live if not to store into our bodies every moment of beauty it experiences? To touch and to be touched, to remember and to be remembered, and to live and to die as challenged and dirty as we are, and as beautiful and beloved as we are, such that we are mere matter in love with itself. And everything fades but the beautiful remains, because beauty cannot be taken—it is seen and if seen once, it has always been beautiful and nothing can remove this fact from the cynosure of time.
As Wilde commented in his Lecture To Art Students (1883), “Indeed, to me the most inartistic thing in this age of ours is not the indifference of the public to beautiful things, but the indifference of the artist to the things that are called ugly. For, to the real artist, nothing is beautiful or ugly in itself at all. With the facts of the object he has nothing to do, but with its appearance only, and appearance is a matter of light and shade, of masses, of position, and of value. Appearance is, in fact, a matter of effect merely, and it is with the effects of nature that you have to deal, not with the real condition of the object. What you, as painters, have to paint is not things as they are but things as they seem to be, not things as they are but things as they are not. No object is so ugly that, under certain conditions of light and shade, or proximity to other things, it will not look beautiful; no object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. I believe that in every twenty-four hours what is beautiful looks ugly, and what is ugly looks beautiful, once. And, the commonplace character of so much of our English painting seems to me due to the fact that so many of our young artists look merely at what we may call ‘ready-made beauty,’ whereas you exist as artists not to copy beauty but to create it in your art, to wait and watch for it in nature. What would you say of a dramatist who would take nobody but virtuous people as characters in his play? Would you not say he was missing half of life? Well, of the young artist who paints nothing but beautiful things, I say he misses one half of the world. Do not wait for life to be picturesque, but try and see life under picturesque conditions. These conditions you can create for yourself in your studio, for they are merely conditions of light. In nature, you must wait for them, watch for them, choose them; and, if you wait and watch, come they will. […] Even Venice is not always beautiful, nor France. To paint what you see is a good rule in art, but to see what is worth painting is better. See life under pictorial conditions. It is better to live in a city of changeable weather than in a city of lovely surroundings.”
Therefore, it is not a dream to always live beautifully, but to seek beauty in every act, in every moment, in every love of life which radiates outwards as a measure and expression of the self: even in the darkest room, there is the hope of seeing a darker beauty; even in the ugliest portrait lies the deeper facsimile of beauty in its skin. As said in the The English Renaissance Of Art (1882), “For art comes to one professing primarily to give nothing but the highest quality to one’s moments, and for those moments’ sake.”
And I once wrote about a woman I saw, and whom I loved, and who I dreamed I could witness in all shades of the light, in all manners of the seasons and her days—in her silver grief and her red happiness, in her yellow rage and her green sadness—and who I would gladly admire in her ugliness and her beauty, and the beauty in her ugliness, which I cherish because it belongs to her heart and which I still adore. If our lives could become beautiful, could we become beautiful together, and if so, why do you still haunt me with the promise of Eden and not Eden itself?
“'Who should know that better than you?' answered the Oreads. 'Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.'”
My love of literature is the transference of red blood; my blue veins swirl with the long sanguine of Wilde, Keats, Joyce, Melville, Whitman, and Plath; and my love for literature is an inheritance of a vast caravansary of letters.
I borrow one last time from Wilde’s The English Renaissance Of Art (1882), “This is that consolation des arts which is the key-note of Gautier's poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed—as indeed what in our century is not?—by Goethe. You remember what he said to the German people: 'Only have the courage,' he said, 'to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something great.' The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions: yes, that is the secret of the artistic life—for while art has been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the soul. […] And of such love I think that the abiding presence in our houses of noble imaginative work would be the surest seed and preparation. I do not mean merely as regards that direct literary expression of art by which, from the little red-and-black cruse of oil or wine, a Greek boy could learn of the lionlike splendour of Achilles, of the strength of Hector and the beauty of Paris and the wonder of Helen, long before he stood and listened in crowded market-place or in theatre of marble; or by which an Italian child of the fifteenth century could know of the chastity of Lucrece and the death of Camilla from carven doorway and from painted chest. For the good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it. […] Its real influence will be in giving the mind that enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of common life for us—whether it be by giving the most spiritual interpretation of one's own moments of highest passion or the most sensuous expression of those thoughts that are the farthest removed from sense; in accustoming it to love the things of the imagination for their own sake, and to desire beauty and grace in all things. For he who does not love art in all things does not love it at all, and he who does not need art in all things does not need it at all.”
In my life, I have watched my wife burn in a wedding dress of fire; in my life, I have slain with my bow a bevy of suitors as a solatium for our honour. In her life, I have answered three riddles and offered my true name to her power; in her life, I have witnessed twenty-three levels of the afterlife in search of seeing her again. But in this life, I have watched from a crowded ferry in Brooklyn too; in this life, I have swum alone in the cold troughs of San Sebastian. In one life, I have been returned to my sanatorium in Switzerland; in one life, I have been shocked by the threat of hellfire into the priesthood. And I have lived a thousand other lives too; and I have lived none of them at all; and therefore, I have lived them all and so have you—wind and sun.
“And the pool answered, 'But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.'”
Every artist is a critic of life; as Wilde wrote in his 1981 essay, The Critic As Artist, “Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind. I am always amused by the silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work. The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.”
And likewise, it is the artist who acts as the greatest critic of themselves; we are always peering, always wanting, always striving to live better, fuller and richer than before, in aching autopoiesis. We spurn the cliched life, we eschew the quotidian and propone the beautiful: we claim that life is a canvas we are continually painted on—abiogenesis.
At the beginning of this essay, I was struck by a painting; at the end of this essay, I strike back against it. Its object is pure reaction; in a day, I was reminded of years. And my bastard aesthete is reified as a sacrosanct scaffold for older traditions; I define my old inheritance as a paean of beautiful death and a long-voweled life, beginning with Keats and Wilde and ending with myself, like Chatterton in the small contemplations of my room and the wind and sunlight peering through.
I am reminded of the Keats sonnet I committed to memory a long time ago, and which haunted me for the longest time, as an existential challenge, as a calling to my stars, or to the aspect of divinity which lies in each person, and which many live long enough without seeking to reach; and if they do, they could fail nonetheless beautifully.
But we write literature not to convince ourselves, but others, of their own divinity; we write to others to reveal the aspects of themselves they do not yet know, but could know, such that sometimes we write so desperately, we make fools of ourselves, cajoling and pleading with them to awaken to the tremendous beauty of themselves, which they cannot see, but which I can, such that I would surrender to words the innumerable caverns of how I feel, out of love for a human being in the flashes of Eden I see in you.
You remind me of the wind and the sun; when I am with you, I am back in that room, in those days I spent with Keats and Wilde; you give me no fears of ceasing, but only of living and living beautifully, which I have sought all my life, with the furiousness of a single particle, in the strength of a single scintilla, nevertheless in the journey that one must make through life, on route to the heart, and eventually out its other side—align the beauty of your heart to mine, and in this life, we will pass through them together.
Chatterton is the fate of all artists who cannot bear such a life; the weight of beauty becomes too much for them, such that the final repose of death, which gives rest to the weariness of soul in search of beauty forever, forgoes the suffering of beauty for the suffering of death, which arrives posthumously in the lives of the living. Imagine if Keats had perished himself before his Odes, or if Shelley had denied himself before his Alastor or Mont Blanc, or if Wilde had forgone his stories of The Doer Of Good, The Disciple and The Master, and how we would mourn them, because they would have showed us Eden again, in spite of them suffering to do so, so that our suffering as human beings is slightly made softer together.
You are irreplaceable to me like an artist; you can rediscover the nature of the stars, but never the stars themselves, such that knowledge is nothing compared to beauty, and once beauty is gone, it always exists, but never in the same way unlike knowledge; so forgo the scientist and save the poet, because the latter appears once in this world and never again, and neither will you and I, and so I want you more.
And I have discovered the nature of you, and like others of my lineage, I cannot bear your second dying, Chatterton, nor your third, nor our beautiful death which we denied from ourselves to live, for the rest of our lives, and for yours, in the greater mysteries of the wind and the sun.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
“I am still shaken to life by the sheer and vital life of the Romantics, or that infinite smallness of the human heart, which encapsulates every movement before and every movement since, and which cannot be moved except by the motions of the smallest beauty in this human lifeworld.“
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