Frisson and bloom

There are some lines that, after all this time, still ring in my head. Whenever I sit down to write one of these monologues, the thoughts I've amassed in my mind dissipate into nothing. Whatever cognitive artillery I was able to bring to the dialectic before has been spent on staving off a complete collapse in academic credibility, and now that it is over I am left with nothing but a hollow cavern in my head. I am merely typing now in the hope, however vain, that I can begin to reconstruct some semblance of a worldview not squelched by an obstreperous mind. 

In that vein, it would only be appropriate, given the season and approaching holidays, to relate the story of the Christmas reckoning as it is told in Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's an understated and beautiful novel, fictionalizing the short life of Friedrich von Hardenburg, or as the world now knows him, Novalis. A romantic philosopher-poet (that strange admixture which in all honesty should be mutually exclusionary, given the hegemonic influence that classical poetry and philosophy held over 18th-century Germany and the ancient disciplinary divides such a transmission ought to have transplanted) bewitched by a singular and passionate moment of ardor at the sight of twelve year old Sophie von Kühn. It is a love that appears to all interested parties to be intensely irrational and unsuitable. The Hardenburgs were a family that aspired to the noble pretenses common of the aristocracy, their patriarch a rigid man of faith who expected his son to follow him in managing the hereditary salt mines and who found his poetic mind deeply alienating. At their residence in the hometown of Weissenfels an old custom still holds sway, even in the midst of revolutionary upheaval in France and a loosening of old mores elsewhere. It is the Christmas reckoning - an annual penitentiary rite in which the children of the family confess their sins, omitted or otherwise. It is a deeply puritan ritual, a moral self-assessment which could only stem from a mind given to apocalyptic anxieties about the human character. It is 1794 and Christmas Eve when the Freiherr returns home and the children await his entry with anxious anticipation. Friedrich expects that he will be compelled to confess his budding courtship. But instead of consummating the ritual, as he is wont to do, the Freiherr slumps into his seat and makes a confession of his own: 

"You expect me to consider your conduct for the past year, both the progress you have made and your backsliding. You expect me to question you about anything that has been concealed from me. You expect - indeed it would be your duty - to answer me truthfully. You expect these things, but you are mistaken. On this Christmas Eve, the Christmas Eve of the year 1794, I shall want no confessions, I shall make no interrogations. What is the reason for this? Well, in reality, while at Artern I received a letter from a very old friend, the former Prediger of the Brethren at Neudietendorf. It was a Christmas letter, reminding me that I was fifty-six years of age and could not, in the nature of things, expect more than another few years on this Earth. The Prediger instructed me for once not to reprove, but to remember only that this is a day of unspeakable joy, on which all men and women should be no more, and no less, than children. And therefore...I myself have become, during this sacred time, wholly a child." 

This is a novel given itself over to the concerns of the Romanticist sensibility, indeed, attempts to make sense of its beguiling premise through a destruction of the boundaries that separate subject from object, waking from dreaming, wisdom and stupidity, life and death. The revolutionary sentiments of the period crop up frequently. One of the youngest Hardenburgs, known as The Bernhard, speaks flippantly of the seismic shifts occurring in world and thought, of republics without property and death as nothing more than a condition. There is a feverish expectation that runs through the eager Hardenburgs, Friedrich chief among them, that the events in Paris herald the return to a new "golden age". But these divisions and conflicts obscure deeper generational movements of the sort that they themselves begin to feel as they age. Late in the novel, as some members of the family reminisce at the break of dawn in an old family estate, one of the Hardenburg brothers confesses a deep desire: "I should prefer us all to be children...then we should have a kingdom of our own." It is telling that it is The Bernhard who punctures his lofty phantasms, "That has not been my experience," he says dourly. Just as it should come as no surprise that it is only The Bernhard's whose pleasure at the Freiherr's shaken disposition is made known to us and who breaks out into song at the sight: "He is born, let us love him." 

One fault-line not named but which runs an electric course through the book is that between the old and the young. It is the last, and perhaps hardest, boundary that the subjectivist or romanticist has left to break. Novalis is only dimly aware of this. Perhaps he sees it when wandering through a misty graveyard and notes a man standing before a headstone, a man he can see is very much alive but whom he also significantly understands as dead. Or perhaps he glimpses it when he sees Sophie for the first time and finds that "a quarter of an hour decided him". Or perhaps it never happens. Novalis died young, after all. He was not even thirty when tuberculosis smothered him. Sophie was half his age when she passed under the strain of chronic illness and multiple surgeries.

But surely there is something to be learned from the reckoning on Christmas Eve. Something quite anathema to those other thoughts I've had ringing in my head. At a dinner party I was made to attend only recently, where we discussed Fukuyama's End of History over champagne like repulsive elitists, a colleague expressed her gratitude that we were all there, learning to make the world "a less scary place". And the entire time she was speaking I could think only of how much a scarier place I would like to make of the world. The feverish apocalypse breaks in the Freiherr's mind, if only for a moment. It has yet to break from mine. And yet he has become what I wish to make of the world. Novalis quizzes those in his circle about the start of an unfinished story he has written about the eponymous blue flower, desperate to discern some meaning in his own symbolism and yet finds none. Perhaps it is a distant object of yearning like Gatsby's green light or fixed with meaning like the Little Prince's rose. Perhaps it is all of them, rose, flower, light. Novalis could hardly understand Sophie, could not "hear her question". That desire to reach something unreachable, to approach the infinite, propels him to elevate her into Wisdom and Philosophy. But what good is philosophy? Novalis's brother Erasmus reacts with surprise and dismay to discover the mature blossoming of a philosophical disposition in both himself and a worldly family friend, Karoline Just, and to discover that they are both twenty two years young. Time wasted is time that will hold us to account, in the end. 

These raise troubling questions, questions about what it really means to have "matured", about whether and when anyone really grows old and how such a thing might happen. Erasmus looks at Sophie and sees "a greedy infant", but Friedrich sees a gateway to another world. These are questions I cannot answer yet, but it would only be right, a kind of roundabout justice, if the ends I desire precipitate a reprieve from the repression I'd like to see imposed. But I would first hope that I can see the joy in this coming holiday. If the "golden age" is in fact a world without reprove, if to truly be a child again is to establish a kingdom without judgment and penance, then I should like to see that with my own eyes, to see it in myself most of all through the reflection of mirrors and persons and time. I have a sneaking sensation that, just as an early death snatched the blue flower from Friedrich von Hardenburg's tentative grasp, I will live only long enough to see that born again dream slip away.