A Product of Romanticism

While I have a lot or respect for the teachings of the enlightenment, I’m definitely more a product of romanticism than I am of the enlightenment. I love learning new things and I believe that logic and rationality are important when making decisions or trying to figure things out. But I am also a person of great feeling. I reject the notion that our emotions are worthless and need to be shut out so that rationality can dominate our lives. Instead I believe that reason is a tool we can use to balance our emotions and prevent us from going overboard with passion and making mistakes as a result. Ultimately emotion is how we experience life, and so emotion should be cherished. I love to listen to music or watch shows that make me feel something, whether it be joy, sadness, excitement or anger. To me it feels good to be sad when a favorite TV. show character dies, or to listen to a song that’s full of passion and energy.

 I also love nature and the untamed wilderness. Some of my favorite things to do are hiking and camping, because I like being outside among the trees and the mountains, the rocks and the hills. There is so much beauty in the world that man-made buildings and landscaping can never match. Those things can be beautiful as well, but they just can’t compare to the ordered randomness or nature, to a lichen covered rock with its many shades of green and yellow, or to the way the red mountains look in the evening when I’m hiking along my favorite trail. 

William Hogarth's Gin Lane

Gin Lane, by William Hogarth, is a satirical engraving showing the dangers of gin and alcoholism. The engraving shows several groups of alcoholics partying, rioting, and selling all of their possessions to a pawn shop. The artwork has a goofy, humorous feel, and it pokes fun at gin drinkers while also showing an exaggerated example of what can happen when a society becomes addicted to alcohol.

The buildings in the background of the print are shabby and ruined, and one building is starting to collapse. The walls on the building in front of it have broken off revealing a man who has hung himself, and many of the people in the scene are wearing frayed, tattered clothes. The bare breasted woman sitting on the stairs is so drunk that she lets her baby fall out of her arms to his death. There is also a man prancing around with a baby skewered on a stick. These elements of Gin Lane suggest that gin causes people to neglect everything and just let society rot and fall apart.

On the left side of the print there is a couple selling their possessions to a pawn broker, and a man fighting with a dog over a bone, who presumably sold everything he had to buy more gin and now has nothing to eat. On the right side there is a distillery where people are fighting over the gin with chairs and hammers, showing the lengths people will go to get their gin once addicted.

Gin Lane also shows that gin addiction can only lead to death. Towards the background there is a woman being lowered into a coffin while her crying child sits beside it. Sitting on the front of the stairs is a dead man who it still holding a cup and a basket with a bottle in it. In the basket there is also a newspaper with the headline “The Downfall of Mrs. Gin.”