Letter #67: First Love

Can we go home?

O myn fader,

What do you know, I’m reading Malory’s King Arthur stories too. And I’m noticing something similar to what you describe. The art comes from taking this inherited stock of character types and infusing the template with new quirks. You start with the archetypal figure of “the young, hotheaded knight,” then you fill in little unexpected details until you get Gawain, an unmistakable and distinctive character.

It’s like a modern individual emerging against the medieval backdrop. But then you’re already past the threshold of a new era as the clear, shining lines of the medieval background start to fade away. Malory, writing at the end of the 1400s, was already on the verge of the journey away from the Middle Ages, into the modern world in which we’re lost today.

It’s like a childhood we can’t go back to, an Eden guarded by an angel’s flaming sword. Wordsworth, as you know, thought everything we longed for was just behind the horizon of our lost youth: “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” But there’s no regressing to infancy, no traveling back to days gone by for people or for civilizations.

We can’t unlearn the fact that the earth revolves around the sun, or unsee the mere humanity of our priests. However earnestly we aspire to the heroic archetypes of legend, none of us is exactly Gawain, or Arthur, or Merlin—like Hamlet, we all know the melancholy pain of growing too complex for the constraints of a standard story to contain.

The question before us is whether the particulars of this modern life, so different from those of the medieval world, can be animated by the medieval spirit. It’s whether the realities of the digital age can gleam with the same luminous meaning as the legends of the Middle Ages. I think they can. I think they’re already starting to.

For example, quantum physics suggests that we rational animals might be at the center of the universe after all—just not in quite the geolocational way we once thought. Much of what proved false as science is proving true as spiritual imagery, as if the medieval picture of the world was a kind of prophetic dream or symbol of something we would have to re-discover upon waking.

Novalis, a blazing German visionary, said that medieval Europe’s Christian faith was like “a first love”—fresh, sincere, pure, but too tender to survive in its youthful form. Novalis himself had a first love, his sweet Sophie, who died tragically at 15. He was always looking ahead to their reunion after death, her image melding in his poetry with those of God’s divine wisdom and the Virgin Mary.

Like Dante chasing his memory of Beatrice or Petrarch hunting after Laura, Novalis hoped to recover in a redeemed future what he had lost too soon in a tragic past. I think it just might be we’re in the same position at a cosmic level, our whole species yearning its way forward into a future that looks like the lost darling of the past—totally transfigured but familiar as a first love.

Love,
Spencer