The Curse of Memory

So many things you look for in life, or want, or desire, seems to be not some immediate thing or future goal but rather a recapturing, refocusing, resuscitation of a memory. You had an experience, and by nature of being a young, these experiences seem in retrospect electric, powerful, immense, dramatic, extra proportional, large. Back then you were still not quite awake yet, your consciousness was still in the process of awakening from the sleep of childhood - indeed, much of life is an awakening of our consciousness, finding out who we are, wondering what it means to be alive and exist as a being in the world. Because we are not quite awake when we experience things, we can't quite remember what exactly it was that happened to us, as if this remembered life of ours happened to a stranger, appearing as an almost recognizable actor moving about in random images of some helter skelter movie playing in our heads. In retrospect, these experiences seem magical, special, better than what we are experiencing now, the bland mundane day to day routine and habitual of our lives today.

This is what the Romantics were about, dealing with the magical memory of the past, the personal past, in contradistinction to what had previously been taken care of with religion, the Christian religion, where our past as a spiritual species was all divinely documented and clarified in the myths of Genesis. God as son of man, Man as child of God, sinful, but with good behavior promised a place in heaven and deliverance from evil and material, corporeal suffering. But once Enlightenment rationalism, science, and philosophy popped our mythic consciousness and woke us up, there was indeed a vacuum fore those unable to trust and perceive with the ancient mythic mind - this was a monumental rupture (i.e., Modernism, with origins in the Renaissance) of the very fabric of our organ of consciousness, the way we understood nature, God, man, and all of reality, really. What replaced God was a set of rational, mechanical laws and rules that basically placed man as merely a cog in a great big unthinking machine, which God may or may not have created and set in to place, but then walked away from to let it runs its course.

So the Romantics, thoroughly bowled over by the knockout punch delivered by the rationalistic Enlightenment religion busters, started to seek the god like in nature, in the child, the innocent glory of a child and his pleasures, this haunting little image of us as a child that follows us around as adults and reminds us of a glorious, golden age, this little child the father to our man in that all he experienced as a child formed who we are and now that we are no longer the child, we still yet remember how joyful he was, how unconscious and without care, without thought and doubt, perfectly unworried in his feelings, unaware of impending death and the dissolution of his own body, of mortality. The Romantic poem was a revival, a reconjurance of this image of this us-child, the feelings and emotions that were so powerful then and still have the power to affect us today as an adult. The image of us as a youth and the remembered glory and dream of the visionary gleam we once had in our eyes not only pollutes our minds with impossible and love-sick yearnings and desires for a past that is completely gone from the world, at its worst acts like a movie projector, like a shadow on the wall, this image our ourselves and the magic surrounding those memories adds a glow and image to everything we see, all the people we know and the goals we try to reach, all colored by the glowing image of the child within us, distorting the color of reality, reshaping our worlds, as we try to make our adult lives live up to the person myths of our own rosy beginnings.

Wordworth's take, oratorically busting out his vision, :

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Coleridge break it down for us, slightly more mystical and lyrical:

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.