I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist. - John Barth

There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for "wild" gardens" around those "broken" columns), and indeed we have heard Schlegel's Julius explicitly rejecting "all that … we call 'order'" in his Lucinde project. But it is clear that in fact he and his creator have a veritable passion for form — in Wallace Stevens's famous phrasing, a "rage for order" — and that what they're rejecting is only certain "conventions" of order and form. I prefer to think of Schlegel as a "romantic formalist" — a term that I apply to myself as well — and I will venture to say that the principal difference between Romantic romantic formalism and Postmodernist romantic formalism is that the latter, more than the former, inclines to the ironic (though impassioned) reorchestration of older conventions — including the classical and the neoclassical — rather than to their rejection in favor of "new" forms.

The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did.

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.