A new mindset has emerged in the modern world. The origins of this strikingly new perspective reach back at least to the sixteenth century. The viewpoint treats our existence as immensely intriguing, but essentially meaningless. Artists, thinkers and scientists under its sway explore the world as if it had no inherent purpose, with a further assumption that the creatures who inhabit it are, at heart, driven mostly by the struggle to stay alive. The upshot of this mix of wonder and pointlessness is that people feel as if they live in what Blake called a “cavern”; a universe that sparkles but also intimidates as it feels vast and impersonal.
A welter of reactions is provoked by this conviction, from curiosity and possessiveness, to despair and zealotry, as human beings—both individually and at the level of societies—try to secure a sense of purpose. Blake parodies the increasingly frantic attitude when he writes, “By demonstration man alone can live, and not by faith”; we must tease apart and investigate, better exploit the environment that envelops us, and—as is increasingly felt today—work out how to survive. The temperament assumes that what is not empirically or logically graspable probably does not exist; it distances people from the wellsprings of existence that lie beyond sense and reason and so renders individuals and entire cultures forgetful of how “To see a World in a Grain of Sand | And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, | Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand | And Eternity in an hour”.
Blake sought recovery. He strove to awaken and embolden a re-expanded imagination through the use of poetry, imagery, and piercing insights. Further, unlike many of the Romantic figures with whom he is often grouped, he did not proceed by rejecting the political and technological revolutions that so dramatically marked his era (and have continued in our own), or by appealing to lost times and distant moods, as if he were a lone, tragic visionary. Rather, he realised that the spirit of his age (and, I would argue, ours) is an expression of a true hope, though one that has become deeply, dangerously confused. As he summarises the alternative in possibly his most famous lines: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
In other words, Blake’s remedy is not to fear what is unfolding, nor, if we are of a more optimistic bent, to flatter ourselves with tales of how, after a long history of error and superstition, this is the moment in which we are truly making progress. Instead, he aimed to awaken the awareness lost to closed doors of perception by better discerning the boundless longings that drive all this activity. Working out exactly what he means by this thoroughly engaged approach, and how to direct the energies that buffet and inspire us, is a core part of the thrill and challenge of reading him.