Spring Break

Spring break in London was always a moment of panic, a time when you suddenly realized that winter was over and exams were just around the corner..another year about to be wasted. Back in the land of the pure, the break is a time of quiet reflection, a time to catch one's breath, do some reading, spend more time with family, and in general not take time too seriously...drift a little while or, rather, drift at your own pace, as the world floats by, humming Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay...

Have you ever considered any other freedoms?
---Brando.

Someone commenting in the Independent wrote this:

'I thought it was a brilliant film in its deconstruction of the "party" genre by presenting us with a grim reality that spring break is built on loneliness, a violent drug trade, predatory male violence, and delusions of grandeur.' 

A particular notion of the self in the social sciences has come to dominate: disengaged, disembedded, free from the constraints of tradition, religion, society state and family. The individual is always someone who breaks free from the shackles (is the ultimate individual the outlaw, the renegade, the misunderstood genius who stands outside society's norms and who is 'before his time'?).

Of course, this view of what constitutes a deep sense of the individual, one free from the mechanical following of imposed norms, rules, is itself part of a tradition. One strand of religious thought has always suggested that 'exile' and 'exodus' are the natural (or at least the highest) expression of our humanity: the rebel with a Cause. Neither Greek nor Jew, neither of the east nor the west. But is that the same as being without any orientation whatsoever? 

Romanticism and late capitalism are strange bedfellows but is there a shared idea of the free-floating self who creates his own identity, and who heroically casts off the bonds to find, discover his or her "true self"?  The restless self, the self as 'a project', disdainful of all that is merely 'given'. All that is solid melts into air (why do you think of Caspar Friedrich when you say that?).

Haven't seen the film and doubt I will, but what struck you was the notion that there could be, paradoxically, a ritual that is supposed to initiate you into some version of freedom. 

'To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilizing old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.'
---J. Franzen.

There were these lines by Schuon on the Red Man, in his beautiful book, The Feathered Sun, about how the loss of character is a terrible Fall. Orientation: a sense of "up", a sense of "down" (Milosz).

Rowan Williams's fab. lecture: here