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I'm a rootless man, but I'm neither psychologically distraught nor in any wise particularly perturbed because of it. Personally, I do not hanker after, and seem not to need, as many emotional attachments, sustaining roots, or idealistic allegiances as most people. I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness; it does not bother me; indeed, to me it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it. I can make myself at home almost anywhere on this earth and can, if I've a mind to and when I'm attracted to a landscape or a mood of life, easily sink myself into the most alien and widely differing environments.

 

Richard Wright

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I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness; ... it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it ... I've been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experience I have fallen heir to.

 

Richard Wright

 

Ironically, the belief that the new age was essentially different from the past led to the emotional need to find "roots" in the past, to find some continuity with man's great achievements of the past. The unprecedented nature of so many of the architectural tasks and the altered conditions for their realization inevitably produced originality at the level of planning and construction; but as the Romantic architect and, indeed, sensible men realized, man is an emotional creature who needs to be reassured by the familiar and the intelligible. It is a measure of Schinkel's genius that he could provide such functional solutions to particular problems, clothe them in intelligible and expressive forms, incorporate them so felicitously into their environment, and make it all seem so natural and inevitable.

 

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

 

Novalis can thus be seen as one of the originators of a modern gnostic approach to drugs, in which nature is abandoned for negative, transcendental space. Gnosticism is a vast and diffuse subject, but I will use the work “Gnostic” in this chapter to describe a worldview that sees the material world and nature, as a fallen, corrupt, inauthentic place, and man as an alien, trapped within it. To escape, man seeks the flash of gnosis, or knowledge, in the form of a transmission from another cosmos or transcendental dimension in which the] truth resides, and which is in fact man’s real home. This transmission can take various forms, but drugs, as Novalis uses them, are certainly one of them: opium may come from nature but its essence belongs to the transcendental night, and by taking the drug, the user is able to negate his or her own body and environment, temporarily.
When nature and the human body are abandoned, a new, Gnostic theory of heath becomes necessary, since “natural health” is precisely what is to be abandoned. This new notion of health would consist precisely in an organism’s ability to sustain an abandonment or overcoming of the body. But the body does not naturally sustain such a state of “health”; in fact, the word we use to describe this state is “sickness.” Drugs appear in Romanticism as one of the more obvious ways of producing, or sustaining, this unnatural state of health—a revolt against the limits of the animal body.

 

Novalis

 

Get wealth if you can by honorable means, and if it do not cost too much. A true cultivation of the mind is fitted to forward you in your worldly concerns, and you ought to use it for this end. Only, beware lest this end master you; lest your motives sink as your condition improves; lest you fall victims to the miserable passion of vying with those around you in show, luxury, and expense. Cherish a true respect for yourselves. Feel that your nature is worth more than every thing which is foreign to you.

 

William Ellery (preacher) Channing

 

The whole of Asia believes in reincarnation, in being reborn in another life. When you enquire what it is that is going to be born in the next life, you come up against difficulties. What is it? Yourself? What are you? a lot of words, a lot of opinions, attachments to your possessions, to your furniture, to your conditioning. Is all that, which you call the soul, going to be reborn in the next life? Reincarnation implies that what you are today determines what you will be again in the next life. Therefore behave! — not tomorrow, but today, because what you do today you are going to pay for in the next life. People who believe in reincarnation do not bother about behavior;t all; it is just a matter of belief, which has no value. Incarnate today, afresh not in the next life! Change it now completely, change with great passion, let the mind strip itself of everything, of every conditioning, every knowledge, of everything it thinks is "right" — empty it. Then you will know what dying means; and then you will know what love is. For love is not something of the past, of thought, of culture; it is not pleasure. A mind that has understood the whole movement of thought becomes extraordinarily quiet, absolutely silent. That silence is the beginning of the new.

 

Jiddu Krishnamurti