Have a Romantic Valentines Day

I teach my freshmen Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," ostensibly as an example of an argumentative essay (the narrator's trying to convince you that he's merely "nervous" not "mad!")  In the Fall, I of course like to teach it near Halloween.  Spring semester, the best I can do is teach it on Valentines Day.  It's a very Romantic story you see--Romantic in the oldest sense of the word, a sense that is too often lost today.

For Poe was a Romantic you see--but not in the contemporary Rom-Com sense of some hopeless and sentimental fool with a heart of gold, buying roses and Hallmark cards and holding stereos over his head playing Peter Gabriel, starring in brightly-colored romps featuring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey and '80s soundtracks.

No no no no--I mean Romantic as in the European art movement, the one that started in Germany in the late 1700s, then spread to England, France, Russia, and finally the United States.  These Romantics wanted to live like Romans again--passionate, frenzied, excessive, self-destructive.  They stood in contrast to their Neo-Classicist predecessors, who preferred restraint, calmness, elegance (Mozart was a Neo-Classicist; Beethoven was a Romantic).  "Why all this passion and emotion?" sighed these Greeks, "You're being self-destructive!" 

"Exactly the point," rejoined the Romantics, "We're all going to die anyways; let's live life fully while we still can."

And indeed, the Romantic poets tended to die young in the frenzy of their esctacy--John Keats and Percy Shelley at 29; Lord Byron in his 40s; Poe himself did not breach his 40th.  Their lives were marked by alcoholism, Opium abuse, wars, fights, fetes, and sordid and forbidden love affairs of such passion that it nearly tore them apart.  "Lord Byron is mad, bad, and dangerous to know" warned one of his affairs. 

These weren't men and women seeking to simply "like" their lover, or deliver flowers, or live in tranquil harmony--these were love affairs that were built by design to fail spectacularly and hurt abominably, and possibly take one or both of them with it.  This is the Romance of Romeo and Juliet, Triston and Isolde, and of too many a Dostoyevsky novel. 

They were seeking the Sublime moment you see--in chemistry, the sublime is when a solid transforms into a gas, bypassing the liquid state; in art, it's when the mind moves from a solid to a gaseous stated, atomizing in the face of the overwhelming and all-encompassing awe.  The Sublime by definition is self-destructive; it has to be, to deliver the full experience of beauty and glory.  You are missing out on all the wonder that the Universe has to offer when you cut yourself off from Sublime experience.

Here in America, we still live in the shadow of the Romantics; our love of mountains and oceans, our veneration of James Deans and dead rock-stars--shoot, even our preference for marriages of romance, based not (as they have been throughout the super-majority of human history) on political alliances, economic convenience, or mere "mutual affection," but on bona fide passionate, painful, soul-searing, love-will-tear-us-apart Romance, is the heritage that the Romantics have bequeathed us.

But then, we are also living in the shadow, the dim and immaterial shadow, of the Romantics--today the term "romantic" has come to mean something far quieter than it did 200 years ago.  Today, to be "romantic" is to do something cutesy and small that elicits an "awww!" as opposed to "awe."  Today, "romantic" refers to roses and Hallmark cards and candy and quiet dinners and bad movies with predictable and monotonous tear jerks on cue, and carnal relations carefully hidden quietly behind closed doors. 

Don't get me wrong: The quiet moments of mutual affection are necessary, even essential, to building a strong relationship.  By way of corollary, I believe the most profound religious experiences can occur in the quietest moments.  But maybe it's not a coincidence that America's unofficial holiday of romance is the same day as a bloody massacre and a martyrdom; I want you to have a Romantic Valentines Day.  But I also want your Valentines Day to actually be Romantic!  I want love to tear you apart.