Willam Wordsworth and the Meaning of Balance
Updated: Oct 4
Why balance isn't about splitting the difference.
A lot of people think of balance as a compromise. Work/life balance. Dietary balance, etc. You find some middle ground. On a graph, it would be the mean.
Enter William Wordsworth:
According to the literary critic, Harold Bloom, a lot of Wordsworth’s work revolved around one main issue:
How do you remain true to yourself while still belonging to the world?
This is a question that all of us have to face sooner or later. We want freedom, that ability to follow our own path. But we also want company, relationships. We have to function in the world.
These are two natural desires that never really go away. Which is why we need to read Wordsworth:
In Tintern Abbey, he goes back to a landscape that he loved when he was young. He’s talking about his place in the larger world.
"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her."
In The Prelude Wordsworth talks about being pulled in two directions. One toward imagination and his inner life and the other toward society and duty. He admits he’s “wedded to [his] own delights,” but he's also pulled toward “social objects.”
There’s tension.
He tries to reconcile self and the world, and Bloom calls this the “egotistical sublime,” which can seem a little confusing because of the “egotistical” part.
What he’s talking about is what happens when the self grows beyond itself. When memories, nature, imagination all deepen our connection to the world instead of replacing it.
For example, in The Prelude, he describes what he calls "spots of time." Moments that stay with us.
Echoes of another Romantic, John Keats, who nailed this concept in Hyperion:
"Oh aching time! Oh moments, big as years!"
We all know exactly what he's talking about.
In fact, this is a little aside, but for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, I gave them a big card that listed 50 moments as big as years in our family. It included such mundane things as getting my first pair of running shoes, or our first puppy, to graduating from high school. I even included some funny or poignant comments that were made over the years that just stuck with me. These moments, some big, some small, had quietly become a part of who I was, and also my parents.
Wordsworth believed that it was these types of “spots of time” that held the self together.
Very different from “splitting the difference.”
One life. Not two.
Imagination, love, duty, memory, wonder—they all become part of the same life.
That’s the sweet spot. That’s Sparkle Valley.
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