Zen-Haven May 15 2013

Romanticism was a movement of the mid 1700s until the midpoint into 1800s; it was a movement of painting, art, and writing that emphasized warmth, color and softness.

I was very influenced in the early days of my writing by romantic French writers like Stendhal, Flaubert and Baudelaire who said: “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.”

Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement when perceptions shifted as a reaction against the logical thinking that was then described as the Age of Enlightenment, during which time people felt reason and facts were the only way to go. Wikipedia says “While thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reasoning, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination and feeling.”

You can see the color and romance in this painting by Irish painter Daniel Maclise.

I realized that the things I teach today are a return to Romanticism for we seek to establish an order built on softness, colourful expression and tender sentiments. In a world of perpetual war and the grey, yang-style harshness of a scary media, and the cold logic of technology, and a New World Order that we don’t want, romanticism offers us a ray of hope—a softer way.

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