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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2023
I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.
(Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, 44)… this inability to think through anything but the materials right now in my room, wherever or whatever my room might be, whether bubble or cell or gallery or mausoleum or website.
(Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘Fag Limbo’ 197)Like Coleridge's Mariner or Keats's ‘living hand,’ Romanticism has often been read with and through figures of beholding, holding onto, or letting go of concepts: mind and world, subject and object, idealism and materialism, inside and outside, lyric and narrative, persons and things. ‘Insofar as Romanticism holds together, then as now,’ writes Jerome Christensen, ‘it coalesces as a writing about how things or persons (or things and persons) hold together’ (xxi). The wager that Romanticism holds ‘then as now’ suggests that whatever it was and is, Romanticism continues to exert its adhesiveness by thinking about how persons and things coalesce, how they fall apart, and how thinking itself is a thing. And even more, it is about how thought orients us around things that may be obstacles. Take the following well-known orientation lesson:
In the darkness, I can orientate myself in a familiar room so long as I can touch any one object whose position I remember. But it is obvious that the only thing which assists me here is an ability to define the position of the objects by means of a subjective distinction: for I cannot see the objects whose position I am supposed to find; and if, for a joke, someone had shifted all the objects round in such a way that their relative position remained the same but what was previously on the right was now on the left, I would be quite unable to find my way about a room whose walls were in other respects identical.
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