Sorry about the mishap yesterday! But we still had a very lively engagement with the ideas of the young Romantics. The film Pandaemonium was true "find". It captured some of the revolutionary enthusiam (and danger) of being a Romantic at the turn of the 18th/19th Century. It is often hard to imagine authors in books - famous for 200 years- being young people full of excitement and zeal. And I do think that the ideas emerging in poems like "Expostulation and Reply" & "The Tables Turned" are still being fathomed in our own times. What can turn the destructive direction of the outward-directed, materialist ambitions of the superpowers if it is not the inward-directed idealism of each individual on this planet. So much is implied in that phrase "wise passiveness". I believe it is a life's journey to understand- with experience rather than just logical/ head knowledge- just what "wise passiveness" is and what it can give in terms of understanding our real purpose on this planet.
Incidentally did anyone see that amazing photo in the Herald today of that "other" galaxy, far larger than our milky way, which contains billions of suns like our own... and trillions of planets..... that puts the limitations of our intellects into some perspective.
See: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/category/galaxy/ :
Cheers
MG
