“What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awake, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?”
(Samuel Coleridge)
At the first reading, one might go ‘uhh…WHAT????!!!’ At least, that’s what I did. Samuel Coleridge was an English Romantic poet, one of the Romantics of the nineteenth century. This thingy quoted above might seem very, very weird to some people and a complete waste of time to everyone.
But as is the case with every long and seemingly incomprehensible quote, if you think just a bit about it, with enough knowledge about the Romantics, it could actually make sense; it would seem to be the most beautiful thing ever quoted.
What is this quote? Not some words spun out by some boring poet, but a simple illustration of the foremost characteristic of the Romantic poets. It gives us the ultimate view of the yearning for something distant and unattainable. They longed for by-gone eras, the distant cultures like the Orient with its mysticism, and were irrepressibly drawn towards night, twilight, old ruins, and the supernatural.
But maybe what I find the most charming about these Romantics is their preoccupation with the darker side of life, the mystical, the uncanny, and the murky. I wonder if any of them were ever involved in the Dark arts?
Anyways, most of the Romantics stopped all their talk about love and the dark side when they got older. Maybe it was only something for young people. Either they died at 29, or, if they lived beyond their thirties, they became typical middle-class people. And to be one of the Romantics meant that there was danger involved. When Goethe published his novel ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ the suicide rate went up, and the book was banned in Norway and Denmark for some time.
It’s not a waste of time to learn about the Romantics, I feel as if I can read quotes like these and learn their meaning all day…all that I posted here is more or less in this book I’m reading. Believe me, “Sophie’s world” is not a thriller, nor is it particularly gripping, but the part about the Romantics…it’s my soul’s food in there, and I’m addicted to it.
You know, it’s true that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. When you step in again, neither the river nor you are the same as before. I guess I’ll change one thousand and one times before I turn around to step into the river again. I’m that type of person, I change with every word I type, every poem I write, every blog post, very comment, every day, minute, hour, second, I’m a whole new person. My emotions may be written all over my face, but I don’t think that anyone can feel this; maybe only I and Allah could…anyways, I hope you’ve read uptil now (or did I lose you with that first quote?), so plz leave a comment for heaven’s sake and see how I’ll change this time. 
