After the Gold Rush

Recent films about the 1960s belong to one of the basic romantic genres: nostalgic retrospect. The great pioneer of this genre in English was the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth gave us several luminous visions of his rural childhood and of his youth in Paris during the French Revolution. But in romantic literature, nostalgic vision is only the beginning of the story. What happens next, what’s bound to happen, is that the vision is lost: it fades or shatters, or gets twisted into a grim parody of itself. Then the self feels empty of life, thrown into dejection and anguish. Serious romanticism is addressed to people stuck in primal traumas. Facing up to our past—as Hegel said, “to look the negative in the face and live w...