A history of longing
Here’s a great lecture on the ‘American Sublime’ by one Jackson Lears. What we long for feels like some essential part of ourselves, but it might be the leftovers of some dude’s overcooked ponderings a couple of hundred years ago.
Featuring such artworks as:
Lears warns that the sublime is coming back, ending with a bit of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
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