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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 and new insights rather than give final answers. It may contain inaccuracies.
If you are interested in the Sparkle Valley Trilogy specifically, go to the "START HERE" post.
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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.
Sondheim & Novalis: Chasing Flowers, Finishing Hats, and the Irrepressible Force of Art
Stephen Sondheim and Novalis are separated by 200 years. One is a songwriter, the other is a poet and philosopher. One embraces reason and
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