This collection of essays offers a way of reading texts and testaments by suggesting that there is no dispute between critical skeptical thinking and our intuitive grasp of the opulent, shimmering matter that lies strewn all around us. One can wonder at the large forces of existence and yet colour such wonderment with a tenor of incredulity. That is how we deal with the ineradicable vehemence of life as participants and as observers. This could be called a counter-romantic way of approaching icons and images, confessions and treatises, journeys and turbulences. Of the twenty-four essays collated here, several are close readings of a range of arts practices including literature, film and iconography. Others are about antinomian forms of political philosophy. Taken as a whole, the impulse of the essays is to do with the extraction of a certain utopian way of living, to weave ephemera into reality by and through which one hopes to catch the opulence of this our existence, without being overly optimistic. Since art grapples with the ridiculous and the disgusting, the zany and the deadpan, the wrathful and the tenuous, its heretic possibilities are immense. It is this that the humanities must unleash against those who want to conserve harmonious social stratification and algorithmic disinterestedness. Contents Preface The Counter-Romantic: An Introduction The Speaker as the Listener The Ecstatic Archaisms of Aurobindo Ghose Bounty not Immersion The Tamed Cynic and his Untamed Leaves A Governing Tone of Stoic Regression Fairly Directly to Death An Empty Doublet, a Hat, and a Crooked Stick The Aeolian School Balcony The Diva and the Minister Two Modes of Romance The Abused Goddesses and the Fissures of Referentiality Corporeal Incorporeality Myths, Ephemera, Collective The Picnic Managers Anguish and Insurrection On Patronage Municipalising Nature This Beautiful Parable of the May-Be Land On Tyranny and the Strauss-Koj?ve Correspondences Principle in Times Contingent The Crossover is in the Mind That Sun-Craving Crane The Opulence of Existence