On the way to Iowa...

I'm on the way to Iowa for a friend's wedding before I return for my last days of Denver.  My dad is driving the Plymouth Voyager and I'm sitting on the side where the sun glares through the window, a slow roast to my death like an ant underneath the microscope.  But morale is high.  My dad's window keeps inching down its post despite his inventive use of a doorstopper, wedged just so, so the breeze feels nice, however loud it howls.  We got to talking about Romanticism, so now in the silent aftermath, I've taken some time to reflect:

Today has been a good day to get back into romanticism.  On the drive to Iowa, the conversation between my dad and I eventually shifted to my summer class.  There's nothing like being forced to articulate the importance of a literary period to familiarize a person with her areas of weakness.  But it felt good to try to verbally flesh out the social, political, and economic climate of the period.

A few questions or thoughts:

Great art seems to either be reactionary or anticipatory to the zeitgeist of the time.  It must also, however, have a sense of timelessness.  It must be connected to universal concerns across time and space.  There must be some sort of push or pull against society.  It must be sensory.  How can an artist move an audience? What does it mean to be moved?  It means there is an engagement of the senses.  Voluntarily or more often involuntary, the observer experiences a shift in feeling/awareness/perception due to the experience of something sensory.  There is an interaction, then.  The piece of art is created as a sensory object and triggers a sensory experience for the viewer.  So, experiencing great art, then, is both an interaction and a look in the mirror, a paralleling of emotion even if the emotions experienced or evoked are disparate.

I read this last part to my dad to get a sense of how it sounded and he said it gave him a headache.  How fitting!