Review
Culture
Music
Resurrection
Romance
Taylor Swift
6 min read

Taylor Swift proves Mr Bennet right

Romanticism: ruining lives since 1800. And we love it.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Hand-written poetry on a page
Memo: to JA from TS.
@taylorswift Instagr

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bennet has a conversation with his favourite daughter, Lizzy, about her older sister’s heartbreak. He says,  

‘Your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then. It is something to think of, and it gives her a sort of distinction among her companions.’ 

It’s one of those lines, genius as it is, that I would hate were it not written by Jane Austen. But it was, so I don’t. I do, however, like to think that his words are outdated. His thoughts, an artefact. That such a notion may have been true when women were unable to have any kind of aspirations that transcended romantic (and not-so-romantic) attachments, but we’re definitely over that now. I sit smugly in the knowledge that Mr Bennet’s words are a jibe that I can affectionately roll my eyes at; witty, yet redundant.  

At least, that’s what I did think. Now, annoyingly, I’m not so sure. What changed my mind? Well, Taylor Swift’s latest album dropped. And now I think that Austen, as usual, was onto something. 

The Tortured Poets Department has broken more records than I can count, many of which were broken before it was even released. Love it or hate it (I happen to be in the love it camp), Taylor is going to make it pretty darn hard for you to ignore it. Housed within this juggernaut of an album are thirty-one songs that seek to remind us that it’s better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. Thirty-one songs that offer a masterclass in melodrama. Thirty-one songs that prove Mr Bennet right.  

Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? 

Here’s the theory, the premise, the pop-culture context you need to understand this album’s intentions: ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ was/is a WhatsApp group that Swift’s past-love, Joe Alwyn, was/is a part of. And so, this album is their story; it’s the story of their relationship crumbling, their hearts breaking, their understanding of one another disintegrating. Whether the lyrics are filled with fact or fiction, it doesn’t really matter. We’re soaking it up - every reference, every hint, every clue. These tortured poets have captivated us.  

Agony, tragedy, ecstasy, torment, regret: that’s the currency this album deals in. Heartbreak, I suppose. This record-shattering album is about heartbreak. And it got me thinking, why are we so obsessed with love hurting? Why are Romeo and Juliet something to aspire to? Why is tragedy some kind of signifier of ‘real’ love? Why, as Mr Bennet says, do we like being ‘crossed in love now and then’

The key lyric that holds the first song on Taylor’s album together sums it up pretty well, as Taylor melodramatically declares – ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’.  

Firstly - no it’s not, Taylor. You’re Taylor Swift, a life less ruined no-one could find. But secondly, why is that tumultuous kind of love something to idolise? I’m genuinely wondering. Because, admittedly, I’m as guilty of this as anyone.  

Maybe it’s a way in which we feel as though we’re living a meaningful story, it’s our main-character-syndrome rearing its head. Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? That our relationship is re-arranging the cosmos somehow? That this pain is so powerful, stories will be told of it? Afterall, many of the greatest love stories end in agony, do they not? Would we care about Titanic’s Jack and Rose, La La Land’s Mia and Sebastian, or Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie and Lindsay had they lived happily ever after? Perhaps not. If a beige life is to be avoided at all costs, the torture of heartbreak is, I suppose, a particularly vibrant shade.  

Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious. 

Or perhaps it’s a sensation thing, akin to our obsession with jumping out of airplanes or walking over hot coals. Maybe we just want to feel. And according to most psychologists, heartbreak is one of the most powerful and emotive experiences one could face – a plane could not get high enough, nor coals hot enough, to compete. The science behind it is fascinating. I truly had no idea.  

Which leads me onto my second question – why don’t we care for the science of it?  

Why, when it comes to explaining what we’re feeling, do we declare our ‘heart to be broken’ as opposed to ‘the right side our brain is experiencing a deeply distressing emotional sensation following a shattering of an emotional attachment, triggering feelings of loss and inadequacy’? 

Interesting, isn’t it? How that second definition somehow feels less true. Maybe we have Romanticism to blame for that - the poets, philosophers and writers who shunned reasonable, practical, scientific language in favour of the tragic, the grand, and the sublime. Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious.  

In her song, Guilty as Sin, Taylor writes –  

What if I roll the stone away? They’re gonna crucify me anyway. What if the way you hold me is holy… I choose you and me, religiously.’ 

Yes, she’s comparing her crush on a man to the crucifixion of the Son of God. If this isn’t over the top, I don’t know what is. In many ways, this album knows it’s being silly, over-dramatic and naïve. But it also knows that to be those things is to be as honest as possible. It is shunning human-sized explanations of heartbreak, and is instead desperately searching for the deepest, highest, grandest language it can find - because that kind of language just feels truer. And I find it pretty fascinating that such language still has Jesus all over it.  

All of it has got me thinking, we don’t really want everything controlled, measured and understood, do we? We don’t really want to be the most powerful thing we know. I think that’s a myth. A convincing one, I grant you. But one that has cracks in it. Romanticism is one such crack. School of Life says this about the Romantics, ‘Romantics don’t believe in God, but they go in search of the emotions one might find around religion’. Awe. Transcendence. Our own small-ness in the face of something great – that kind of thing.  

They don’t believe in God, but they crave him. Interesting.  

I think maybe that’s (at least partly) why we want our love stories, the good and the bad, to engulf us, to be something we must succumb to, to be written in the stars – predating our awareness of it and transcending our control over it. We think, at least to an extent, that love and heartbreak, they happen to us. They’re a sacred hand that we have been dealt and must grapple with. This is Romanticism - and apparently it hasn’t gone anywhere, Taylor Swift and her band of tortured poets have just proved it.  

Perhaps Mr Bennet was right after all; perhaps we do have an odd thing about heartbreak. But hey, don’t blame women. Blame the Romantics and that God-shaped hole within them… and within us too, apparently.  

Article
AI
Culture
Digital
Education
6 min read

Could thinking and feeling become futile pastimes in the future?

AI, and more, is eroding our agency, we need to act now

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A seated teenager stretches back bored, a phone is on the table in front of them
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Jane Austen is an author universally acknowledged. So much so that she was acknowledged on the £10 note in 2017. The quote the note bore is not the immortal opening sentence from Pride & Prejudice, but something less obvious:  

'I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading.' 

So concise, so inspiring. However, the quote belongs to her character Caroline Bingley. She isn't reading for pleasure, she's just trying to impress the dashing Mr Darcy. Jane Austen, well before 2017, has always been on the money. Her parable of disparity shows that despite the odds, Lizzie Bennett has agency as she comes face-to-face with Darcy to thrash out their differences. 

Such human agency is now being lost in many ways, as the art of empathy, reality itself, and even thinking are under attack. 

 Firstly, there's what Simon Burton-Jones startlingly outlined Seen & Unseen recently. Our empathy for our fellow creatures, which is taking a nosedive, has a direct correlation to our lack of seeing each other face-to-face.  

Secondly, he noted that reality, or reality as we've known it up until now, might only be really experienced by the wealthy. The fullness of life that is available to each of us is diluted and diminished because we don't suck the marrow out of life, we simply observe it from afar through digital lenses. 

The next, equally startling way agency is being lost is detailed in Mary Harrington's guest essay in the New York Times about how 'thinking is becoming a luxury good'. Only the Caroline Bingleys, and not the Bennetts of today would be reading and expanding their minds for pleasure: 

'In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures… as new generations reach adulthood having never lived in a world without smartphones, we can expect the culture to stratify ever more starkly.'

In other words, there's an ever-widening gap. As our digital and real worlds blend, we need to narrow the gap not just between women and men of different classes, but also where our agency truly resides: our appreciation for our own thinking and feeling. 

This is a tall order, given our devaluing of thinking. We shortcut our brains with AI and cut short the careers of those who've been taught to compute and analyse. The edifice on which many have constructed their careers is crumbling. So, there's the equal danger that thinking becomes both elitist and also perceived as futile. 

It might not be a silver bullet, but education can still lead the way. Parents can't delegate responsibility to schools and must surely be part of the solution. And neither is confining thinking and feeling to those who appreciate Shakespeare. As veteran educationalist Sir Ken Robinson noted, there is an inherent creativity, not necessarily academic, in children that is often flattened beyond all recognition by the education system itself. Any parent of small children will know, as I do, that there is an intriguing inquisitiveness and playfulness in our early years. As a father, I want that to come alive in my children. 

Education can close the gap between pleasure and thinking. The teachers I remember well took the kindling of dry subjects and ignited them. Philip Womack recently said, in The Spectator, that children's literature is increasingly becoming 'easily translated, and easily disseminated, but will it sing in a child's mind, or set it alight?'. 'With a massive decline in children reading for pleasure, this trend will become worse, as publishers attempt to lure children away from screens with increasingly desperate pandering.'  

So let's remove the competition: we must implement Jonathan Haidt's pleadings around banning smartphones for the young. They steal away resilience. 

The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition.

But in a reactive world, what else can we adopt to ensure each child grows up with agency over their thoughts and feelings? Where might deeper resources come from that we can build upon? The Christian tradition offers us a solid foundation. This might not seem instinctive, as Christians can take a dualistic approach to thinking and feeling. I've often heard talk about 'head knowledge' and 'heart knowledge', among some of the Christians I hear. The former is dry and irrelevant at best, and something more sinister at worst. Blaise Pascal wouldn't have recognised this. Sadly, sometimes the more exuberant expressions of Christianity have championed anti-intellectualism. The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition. Advertisers have long understood this.  

Looking back historically, there was an understanding that one's heart comprised both the emotions and thinking. Tennyson encouraged us to 'keep your head about you', and someone losing their temper might phrase it as 'I'm losing my mind.' If our heads are online, it's not just our heads that are on the line. 

Further back, St Paul writes about the Gentiles' 'futile' thinking. There's that F word again. He writes that: 

'They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.' 

To be desensitised to an incarnate life is to numb our thinking and feeling. And the numbing that Paul writes of here is to be separated from the life of God. Paul wants his fellow believers to have 'the eyes of their hearts' enlightened. And the enlightening here is the revelation of who God is. 

This was the gift of the printing press at the time of the Reformation - that power resides not in the pulpit, but in the people's hands. We are now at danger of delegating our thinking and feeling not to a priest but to AI. The Bible is not a straightforward life manual that will tell you which school to send your children to or which car to buy. You have to think deeply, to connect the dots of the grand narrative, to engage your head and your heart. This takes us not only deeper into ourselves, but out of ourselves to one another. Paul's letter to the Ephesians emphasised the closing of the gap between types of people made possible by the cross. For this same Bible warns against being too wise in our own eyes. Ultimately, God’s thoughts are higher than ours. In him we ultimately find the place to process and develop our thoughts and feelings. 

As we convulse through another great revolution, we need to take courage that we each have agency to feel and think, if only we give them enough airtime in our crammed headspace. It's enough to make us think. And to rethink. But we can fling open the gate to an enchanting and enriching hinterland we can never fully traverse. 

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