These Foolish Things

Sigh. And for my first posting on his project I start with a song that is both exemplar and key to what I'm trying to capture here. Indeed, I very nearly named my project after it. For it is the foolish things that touch us, that I plan to catalogue and anatomise in this blog.

Doesn't the song do the same? A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces, an airline ticket to romantic places ... Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations? Foolish things. Why foolish? Because not necessarily bearing intrinsic meaning, but enriched with romance through association. And so the song compiles a potpourri of mournful recollection, redolent of romance because riddled with regret. And how the ghost of you clings.

And this, I think, helps us understand the link between what we term ‘romance’ and love. The romance of things, evoking lost love. As the song regrets a lost lover through the associative triggers of bitter-sweet recollection, so we regret the beauty that we imagine has somehow passed from the world. Imagination dwells the most on love that is lost. Romance is remembering forgotten beauty. Whether this resides in the peerless eyes of the beloved or in an epoch saturated in style, and tinged with sentimental regret.

But why things? Things, objects, are the stuff of romance. They absorb it. Look at these lines from Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes' (1820):

Stol’n to this paradise, and so entranced,
Porphyro gaz’d upon her empty dress,
And listen’d to her breathing, if it chanced
To wake into a slumberous tenderness;
Which when he heard, that minute did he bless,
And breath’d himself: then from the closet crept,
Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness,
And over the hush’d carpet, silent, stept,
And ‘tween the curtains peep’d, where, lo!—how fast she slept.

Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:—
...

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—
“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.”

How could she resist? Porphyro sure knows the way to a girl's heart, and goes to town with the delicacies as a seductive prelude to melting into Madeline's dream. It is a fetishistic tableau of aching desire. Not just for sex, but for the relics and rituals that are the handmaidens of what populates the planet.

Or Daisy Fey swooning over Gatsby's shirts. What lovely, lovely shirts. And so he breaks her heart with his impossible love (and fine tailoring) once more...

So, what are these things, these foolish things?