The End of the Romantics?

Once again I am playing hooky from work.  I’m supposed to be writing about cancer and dogs today -- kind of a heavy topic.  Instead I got distracted by a TV commercial.  I’m not even sure what the commercial was for.  I was getting dressed and it was playing on the TV in the same room.  I heard the speaker talking about the gentleness of nature and the pureness of a baby, blah blah blah.  So my mind started working with that and wondering if it were really true.  Are babies really pure?

Of course, I know that Wordsworth and the Romantics tell us that we’re born pure and we only lose our innocence as we get older.  But as I considered the idea this time I looked at it from a more natural perspective.  Is that what happens with animals?  Not really.  Animals are born with all of the proclivities already in place that they are likely to exhibit when they get older.  They can be influenced by circumstances -- by people, by other animals, by lack of food or lots of food, and so on -- but their basic nature is already there before they’re born.  Their temperaments can be influenced by genetics.  What were their parents like?  It’s not a matter of being pure and innocent or not.  Why isn’t that also true for humans?  You can have a happy cow or a mean cow but it’s still a cow no matter what kind of life she leads.  Is she a “pure” cow or an innocent cow?  Does a cow stay as innocent as a calf?  Well of course not.  But no one of any species stays as innocent as they are at birth.

That’s about the time it occurred to me that I was repudiating Wordsworth.  Somehow that made me very happy.  Not because I don’t like Wordsworth -- I do.  I love the Romantics.  But somehow it always made me sad to think that we have such a loss of innocence as we grow older.  I think it makes much more sense to realize that there isn’t a loss of innocence or “purity.”  There’s simply a development.  A seed that germinates in the ground doesn’t lose its innocence when it sprouts.  It develops and grows.  It’s part of a cycle.  It’s not a loss.

Hmmm.  Interesting.  I’ve always thought the Romantics were the key to everything.  I’m not sure what it means to personally disavow them and see the world differently.