I just finished a play today called Shelley: or the Idealist, and I really enjoyed it. It is about the life of Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and judging from my relatively small amount of knowledge about his life, it was pretty accurate.
In the play, Shelley is portrayed as naive, thoughtless about other people's feelings, brilliant, devoted to his principles, and impulsive. I feel a lot of kinship to him and am ambivalent about that feeling.
I love that I am spontaneous, sensitive to the beauty of the world, idealistic, and open to new and world-changing ideas. I don't love so much that I am sometimes oblivious to the effects of my actions on other people and often jump too quickly into ideas and actions without thinking them through.
I was a lot more like Shelley when I was younger, and after reading the play, I am so happy that I have learned a lesson or two that will make my life turn out so much better than his did. It's hard to say if the changes came with Objectivism or with adulthood, as I acquired both at about the same time.
I learned not to use youth, poetry, passion, or the beauty of the wild, untamed, animal part of myself as an excuse to be irresponsible and callus. I learned to think about the consequences of my behavior to myself and to others. I learned to find poetry in a committed life, a life with responsibilities, a rooted life. I learned that Jane Austen had it right when she wrote, "Without scheming to do wrong, or to make others unhappy, there may be error, and there may be misery. Thoughtlessness, want of attention to other people's feelings, and want of resolution, will do the business" (Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 24).
I cannot hate Shelley because so much of the misery he causes and endures comes from his naivete. But I can see that he gets the just reward of holding (and living) bad ideas and of refusing to take responsibility for his actions. And while I can empathize with him and remember when I was much like him, I am also glad to have grown up.
2 comments:
That's pretty much what I took away from it, although for me I was much more just straight up in that rationalistic idealism he has, where he spins a thousand different arguments and gets lost and content in them, rather than thinking about their relation to reality.
I just last week read about Shelley's life after pondering this passage from Prometheus Unbound:
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
The story of his impulsiveness is legend! I too can relate, thinking back to how I left Sewanee to finish my degree in New Zealand, get married and effectively lose my country. Unfortunately, Percy didn't reach the wise old age of 33, but he did write amazing poetry. And I love how he inspired W.B. Yeats.
Post a Comment