"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples — portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo: indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct."
[Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 11, section 55, translated by John F. Healy]
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Two questions about Romanticism
Student: You mentioned that the psychoanalytic movement looked back on Romanticism. Could you expand on that?
Teacher: They are both very concerned with the process by which experience becomes memory and how the lives we live seem different to us than they actually are. They are both interested in the internal psychic economy. I'm not sure if the link here is causal; in other words, Freud didn't necessarily pick this idea up from Blake (though Freud did say that the poets got there first and he was merely repeating what they said). It may have just been that they were dealing with similar problems and so came up with similar answers.
Student: Wordsworth talks about how we should go to nature to re-orient our moral compass. You hear this idea a lot in the classical authors too. Is the idea the same do you think, or has it changed? Do they mean the same thing?
Teacher: The difference is how they conceive of nature. Virgil writes about an aristocrat's nature, nature idealized away from its connection to peasant labor. In re-writing Virgil, Wordsworth really focuses on the "lower class" elements, how connected it is with the vernacular and a certain form of life.
Teacher: They are both very concerned with the process by which experience becomes memory and how the lives we live seem different to us than they actually are. They are both interested in the internal psychic economy. I'm not sure if the link here is causal; in other words, Freud didn't necessarily pick this idea up from Blake (though Freud did say that the poets got there first and he was merely repeating what they said). It may have just been that they were dealing with similar problems and so came up with similar answers.
Student: Wordsworth talks about how we should go to nature to re-orient our moral compass. You hear this idea a lot in the classical authors too. Is the idea the same do you think, or has it changed? Do they mean the same thing?
Teacher: The difference is how they conceive of nature. Virgil writes about an aristocrat's nature, nature idealized away from its connection to peasant labor. In re-writing Virgil, Wordsworth really focuses on the "lower class" elements, how connected it is with the vernacular and a certain form of life.
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