I’ve Seen Shooting Stars Fall to Earth

Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement that emerged from the late 18th to the early 19th century. It is far different from the everyday idea of romance associated with love‑making or candle‑lit dinners. Philosophically, Romanticism is essentially a stance against rationality, against rigid discipline, and in defense of the freedom of the human soul.

In the late 18th century, the Industrial Revolution took hold across Europe. Cities expanded rapidly, and rational science together with capitalist order came to dominate everything. A group of writers and philosophers could no longer bear this state of affairs. They argued that the world ought not be governed by reason and science alone. Human suffering, fantasy, love, faith, death — these irrational dimensions of life also matter. Thus arose a new school of thought: Romanticism.

If reason and science reduce the world to a set of formulas, Romanticism invites us to set those formulas aside, close our eyes, and feel the beat of one another’s hearts, and the soft breeze brushing past our ears.

For Romantics, not all truths are found inside laboratories. Some truths grow out of suffering and love. A fleeting moment of heartfelt stirrings, they believed, outweighs countless formulas and rules. They would rather lose themselves in pouring rain than trudge numbly beneath the iron‑clad order of society.

From Novalis’s murmurs to Hugo’s outcries, from Liszt’s musical strains to Turner’s sunsets, they all proclaimed: humans are not merely rational creatures. We are sparks of emotion, vessels of the infinite.

Romanticism urges us to live tenderly, passionately and authentically in a cold, mechanical world. If the world is a cold, rational clockwork, Romanticism is a wild weed jamming its gears — making time bloom for its sake.