Dreams of Electric Sheep

This week's crisis by remote control

Wordsworth’s Prelude has a lesson for us all. In it, Wordsworth realises that he has been mistaken. As he sits in a small boat at night on a lake, gazing up at a mountain, it strikes him that Nature does not love him back.

There in her mooring-place I left my bark,

-And through the meadows homeward went, in grave

And serious mood; but after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

This is the death of Romanticism. It is the realisation that feeling leads to falsehood, that the tigers of wrath are not in fact wiser than the horses of instruction. Why does this matter?

The Romantic idea for Wordsworth was that he mistook…