struggling with the world 177kill spirit: that is to say, the expression of our humanity in the exercise
of its power of transcendence.
Th e campaign against repetition extends the re sis tance to all struc-
ture, and threatens to turn it into a re sis tance to life as it must be lived
in the present moment. In life, as in music, the new achieves distinction
and meaning against the background of the per sis tent. We can no more
dispense with the interplay between the novel and the established than
we can renounce the dialectic between engagement and transcendence,
of which the conversation between the new and the existing represents
an aspect. In opposing all repetition, the romantic impulse also under-
mines an indispensable basis for our ties to one another. So, for exam-
ple, if marriage is, as D. H. Lawrence wrote, a long conversation, and if
every long conversation is nourished by its recurrences, the romantic
can have no use for marriage.
Th e element of truth contained in the romantic opposition to rou-
tine is acknowledgement of the inadequacy of any established set of
habits to the expression and development of the self. Routine is, for the
romantic, habitual practice, petrifi ed vision, or the mummifi ed self,
resigned to a single and defi nitive version of its being.
Th e illusion and failure of romanticism lie in an abandonment of the
attempt to penetrate, loosen, and transfi gure the repetitious element in
our experience. As a result, romanticism must, once it has renounced
the easy formulas of its primitive mode, take perpetual fl ight from the
real conditions of life in any society or in any culture. In this respect, as
in all others, the romantic despairs of seeing spirit penetrate the world.
Th e result is that every bond established under the aegis of romanti-
cism becomes a doomed conspiracy against life such as it is, not just in
a par tic u lar place or at a par tic u lar time but everywhere and always.
Th en love turns into an experience that can survive only at the margin
of existence. Th e reciprocal (or unreciprocated) self- bestowal of the lov-
ers is overshadowed by their shared plight. Th ey can hope for no life
together, except in the limiting form of their joint escape from the real-
ity of existence.
Th e alternative to this aspect of the romantic illusion is not the aban-
donment of re sis tance to routine and repetition. It is the eff ort to
change the nature of the relation between the repetitious and the novel
elements in our experience, so that the hold of the repetitious in vision,