Idealism vs Realism

 

Idealism devastated Keats’s knight in the poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’ I imagine the knight as a charming young man until he met Beauty on the hillside. The young woman whom he met on the hillside was the personification of the ideal beauty for the knight. But that ideal beauty was as good as an illusion. It vanished sooner than it had gratified the knight’s quest. However, once you taste the ideal it is hard to be contented with anything less. The knight spent the rest of his life in quest of that ideal beauty. It was a futile quest, however. He squandered a lifetime on an unavailing quest because he failed to understand that the ideals belong to an illusory world.

Keats was a Romantic poet. The Romantic quest is essentially a quest for the ideal form of everything. The Romantics have powerful imaginations which conjure up paradises and hanker after them. Worse, they judge all given reality against those conjured up ideals.

Shelley, another Romantic poet, wrote that “Hell is a city much like London.” Shelley wanted London to be Heaven, an ideal city. The reality that was available to the Romantics repulsed them. They could never accept the injustices, prevarications, compromises and timidity that prevailed all around. Their blood boiled at the sight of such things.

I was a Romantic during my youth. It was one of the many blunders of my life. I could not accept the realities around me - the injustices, prevarications, compromises and timidity, and a whole lot more. I conjured up illusory ideals against which all the given realities were hideous. I grumbled and cursed the realities. I criticised and fulminated.

That was just the wrong way to look at life. The first and most important lesson that I missed was the need to accept reality. Some things are just what they are: hideous. Accept it. You can’t do anything about it but accept it and come to terms with it.

The realist knows that human life is awfully imperfect. Things are condemned to go wrong here on earth. If you are a wise person, you will do what you can to mitigate the downside of your given reality. It’s no use grumbling or fulminating. Accept the simple truth that things could be a lot worse. Accept the simple truth that people are fundamentally on Satan’s side than God’s. Not only things, but even people are also slightly worse than what they seem.

This doesn’t of course mean that one shouldn’t hope for and aspire towards a better world. Contribute what you can towards the creation of a better world in spite of the evils around. It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, as many wise people taught us. The flicker of a gentle candle flame in the raging storm is infinitely better than a million slogans against the evil storm.

PS. This is the first in a series of #MissedLessons. Next: An Ounce of Appreciation