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Alice thinks there are shadows of the French Revolution and England’s Industrial Revolution that reflected dusky images in great works of great philosophers, great thinkers, great artists and great writers.
Did Goethe not take to studying Shakespeare, Homer and Pindar in the tradition of Rousseau and other great philosophers who had higher regard for the great ancient past of England and Germany than for the French Neoclassical tradition, about 40 years before French Revolution began?
Yes and the setting of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” had these shadows over thirty years hence or were these perhaps of the Franco Prussian war? Jane Austen wrote great novels sometime within the Luddite Movement at the beginning of the 19th century at which time she completed “Sense and Sensibility”, “Pride and Prejudice”, “Mansfield Park” and “Emma”, none of which though mirrored images of these shadows. Comte de Saint-Simon’s “scientism” during the French Revolution greatly influenced Karl Marx. Yes, the father of communism who wrote the communist manifesto with Fredrich Engels in Paris. The revolutionary who advocated “merciless criticism of everything existing” is the same one who in his youth wrote poems for his beloved Jenny Von Westphalen but whose poem of “The Man in the Moon” Alice particularly enjoyed. And however did Beethoven create great musical compositions despite his increasing deafness at the time perhaps when Louis XVIII was installed after Napoleon’s crushing defeat? Edouard Manet, the icon of impressionism painted remarkable scene from his studio’s window of the French Holiday of peace to commemorate recovery of France from Prussian war. Two versions of the painting were said to have contained political messages. But of course, this was long before the time of both Voltaire and Lessing whose brilliant and more popular works did not seem to reflect political upheavals. Did the shadow in the Hammer and Sickle drive Ayn Rand to Hollywood and to great philosophical heights in her “objectivism” in her later years?

Slater Brown wrote in defense of E.E. Cummings: “Modern art gets much less explanation than it deserves. The artist is too busy pioneering, the intransigent critic too busy fighting his own battles. Nor does any explanation come from the critics of the older school. They have fear of tasting anything which they cannot recognize at a glance, they refuse to understand anything which is disturbingly new…” Reading between these lines brings Alice here, earnestly hoping to understand the continued relevance of great philosophers, great thinkers, great artists, and great writers…whose lives we read and whose works will continue to be studied by our children’s children, so that some effort has been made to establish affinities with these truly remarkable prime movers.

Alice has no formal knowledge of literature, history and philosophy, only empirical and teleological argument on apparent avocation. Who was it who once said? “Knowledge creates problems that ignorance cannot solve.”

Robert Lowell was one of the exponents of confessional school of poetry that included contemporary American poets: Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton and W.D.Snodgrass that had them writing about untraditional subjects in traditional forms long after the shadows have been laid to rest.

T.S. Elliot defined poetry “as an escape from emotion and personality defined poetic orthodoxy of modernism” John Crow Ransom believed “poetry is a superior form of knowledge which gives us fullness of human experience.”

So while Alice knows no one is born growing up and solving riddles at the same time and then pondering the same questions six feet below the rabbit hole, she realizes only puerile acceptance of the Unknowable is a fortiori. “Vita brevis, Ars lunga”

Victor Hugo wrote: “Genius is a promontory jutting out of the infinite.” Alice is hanging on to her dear life in these promontories and trying to wrestle with lumbering phraseology in an effort to comprehend scientific psychology of the phenomenon of human behavior and while she does, life moves on and art deepens.