History-Writing as Answerable Style

ALL MEN desire knowledge; but not the knowledge explosion. Knowledge may always have had mortal taste yet it used 1 to contain the promise of better position in the scale of being and surer sense of one's true or effective identity. But what if earth becomes an earth of ideas? The sea a metaphor for the multiplication of facts and sensations? What can soul desire, sitting unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly?' The ease with which earth, sea and bird become symbolic counters is part of the problem. Their lapsed value is felt, if only in passing. Marvell's image of the soul, gliding into the boughs, waving in its plumes the various light while it waits to be released from earthliness, is appropriate as counter-reminiscence: that image has reserve of resonances which the mind can explore at leisure, while as whole it evokes that very restraint of ecstasy which makes leisure possible. does not matter, of course, that such images are, or seem to be, from nature; what matters is the quality of our association with them-the decorum of use. It is great Pity that People should by associating themselves with the finest things spoil them, Keats complains, [Leigh] Hunt has damned Hampstead and Masks and Sonnets and italian tales. Hunt's fault is at once moral and aesthetic. Instead of giving other minds credit for the same degree of perception as he himself pos

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Style (visual arts) · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

• Greenblatt's melancholy fetish

  Pieter Vermeulen•Textual Practice•2010

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