FULL FORCE might have been an exaggeration. This blog is back in partial force, mostly because I'm mentally lazy. However, I don't want this to be some forum for my self-deprecation, so I'll share something cool I've been working on for my new German seminar. Yesterday our professor and my classmates (and I) spent a few hours going over some essays by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, a passionate writer on medieval art and Romantic values in art. His most famous collection of writings, from which we took a couple of select pieces, is Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. 'Outpourings of an art-loving friar'! The drama of that title is fantastic. The drama of the essays is fantastic. "Rhapsodic" is a great word to describe them, a word which I knew but pinched from someone else's article on the Herzensergiessungen. They're all about the passion required to make art, the inspiration to be found in nature, and the presence of the divine in nature and in art; art and nature are the two languages through which the transcendent, and unspeakable, can be experienced or expressed by man.
Here are a couple of poetic selections that I liked best (my own translations, so bear with me):

Kunst ist die Blume menschlicher Empfindung zu nennen.
"Art is the blossom of human feeling."

...nächst der Theologie, unter allen Wissenschaften und Künsten des menschlichen Geistes, die Musik den ersten Platz einnehme.
"Next to theology, before all the knowledge and art born of the human spirit, music's place is the most sublime."

Das Säuseln in den Wipfeln des Waldes, und das Rollen des Donners, haben mir geheimnisvolle Dinge von ihm erzählt, die ich in Worten nicht aufsetzen kann.
"He speaks secretly to me in the whispering wind through the treetops and the rumble of thunder, of things which I cannot set down in words."