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Blue Flower Power & The New Romantics
This blog, like Novalis’s Fragments, is an array of informal thoughts meant to inspire reflection rather than give final answers. It may contain inaccuracies. Quizzes, rankings, and evaluative statements are for entertainment purposes only.
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The Non-Romantic Case for Art
The Romantics see art as a transcendent force, celebrating the artist as a seer with unique insight into the universe's mysteries. This...
AI and the Blue Flower
"Art isn't a picture of an experience. It's an experience,"
Sparkle Valley & Calvin and Hobbes
Both Sparkle Valley and Calvin & Hobbes start in the same place—the ordinary. The backyard, a puddle, a slide, a sandbox, a bridge. Then something happens, usually something small, and a new world opens up.
Novalis Quotes (and take aways)
"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason." Creativity help us reconnect with the magic in life when logic takes over. "We are more...
What is New Romanticism? From Novalis to Rorty
New Romanticism: Dream, But Do the Work There’s a reason people keep coming back to Richard Rorty. He gave up on philosophy as the search...
Metaphors: Dewey, Nietzsche, and Kant on Art
Dewey, Nietzsche, and Kant had different perspectives on art, but they share a common Romantic belief in its transformative power. John...
Murmurations, Algorithms, and the Disappearing Real
Read Renée Diresta's article on how online mobs act like flocks of starlings: DiResta compares online mobs to murmurations—those...
Rick Rubin on the Creative Process: 10 Quotes
Rick Rubin , the music producer, has worked with artists ranging from Johnny Cash and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Adele. He recently...
Nabokov’s Butterflies: Fleeting Beauty, Eternal Meaning
"Life is but a brief flutter of a butterfly in a world of infinite possibilities." -Nabokov
The Speed Delusion: A Defense of Lingering
"We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” — Jean Baudrillard The Split Between Bits and...
Nietzsche, the Romantics, and Becoming Yourself
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Nietzsche sketches a strange, but powerful map of personal transformation using three animals: the camel, the...
Tracing the Infinite: Deleuze, Art, and the Blue Flower
Art has the power to transcend boundaries, offering us new ways to see the world. For both Deleuze and Novalis, art becomes a journey—an...
What is Sehnsucht?
Sehnsucht is more than just "yearning." It’s a feeling beyond words—a boundless longing for fulfillment
Killing the Spark? Education and the Blue Flower
In the 1960s, NASA ran a long-term study on divergent thinking—our ability to generate original ideas. The results were stunning: “The...
Willam Wordsworth and the Balance of the Self
Harold Bloom argued that Wordsworth's poetry is an attempt to reconcile inner freedom with external constraint. The Romantic poet wants...
Dead Poets Society, The Catcher in the Rye, and Blue Flower Power
Dead Poets Society Dead Poets Society captures the Romantic spirit: creativity, nonconformity, and the search for meaning. The film...
The Arguments Against Romanticism and the Blue Flower
The Case Against Romanticism Arthur Schopenhauer "The Romantic movement is a symptom of our diseased civilization, and represents a form...
Is an Artistic Life a Virtuous Life? Morality and Romanticism
Romanticism puts personal experience above rigid moral rules, aligning with Kant’s idea that people should be treated as ends, not means....
Wonder, the Sublime, and Blue Flower Power
You know that wide-eyed feeling when something extraordinary hits you—a thunderstorm ripping across the sky, or seeing lava spill down a...
What is Art?
There is one timeless and unwavering principle that underlies all art (and everything for that matter)—the mysterious and unrelenting yearning to get home.
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