Back to Blog
Novalis, a mystical poet, was the son of a strict and devout father, a minor noble and director of the state salt works in Brunswick. In “The Blue Flower,” laundry is philosophical, and philosophy and poetry exist as materially as the fact that the family wash is done three times a year and that a young man will therefore own 89 shirts, allowing for an occasional two-day stretch. Knee-deep in underthings, the two young men below discuss whether there can be said to be such a thing as a thing in itself. “The Freiherr is trampling on the unsorted garments,” shouts the housekeeper from a second-story window. They arrive at the decrepit Hardenberg townhouse only to find themselves under a snowstorm of sheets, pillowcases, chemises and drawers pitched from the upper stories into the courtyard. A young man travels from Jena with his former fellow-student the Freiherr Friedrich von Hardenberg, later famous as the German Romantic poet Novalis. Deceptively small in size, “The Blue Flower” is a fictional evocation of the Romantic movement that revolutionized Europe’s sensibility at the beginning of the 19th century and of the contrast between the intellectual passions of any such large movement and the humbler, more permanent truths of human nature.īig subjects-and Fitzgerald does, in fact, start them in the laundry.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |