The Age of Closed Circles

We are currently living in a dark age of the closed circle when people are enslaved to the shrinking circuits of consumerism and entertainment uh stuck within the narrowly defined conceptions of politics and trapped within the confines of religious fundamentalism. All throughout history, civilizations go through periods of these closed circles. But a renaissance is when the closed circles break open. And I've been writing about the prospect of the next renaissance, a revival of the arts and literature.

I've been writing about this on my Substack essays. And I've recently spoken about it on YouTube here on this channel. But if the next renaissance is going to happen, and I think it will, or it can rather, it's going to require a complete cultural reorientation of our relationship to the world and creativity. So I want to introduce one of the things that it will require of us and this will include some new directions for my teaching in 2026.

So during this past year in 2025, the themes of my courses on vers and on YouTube was enchantment. How can we use literature to reinvent the worlds we live in on an individual level? And we did this by asking how can some forms of art, some forms of reading transform daily life into something creative, something spiritually meaningful. But in 2026, my courses on verse and my content on YouTube and Substack are all going to center around the literature of Renaissance movements.

And these are moments in history where the circles break open. So it's not just the European or the Italian Renaissance, but other movements which include the romantic revival of the 18th century which did really break open a very materialistic understanding of the world. There was the American Renaissance which was started by Emerson Thoro and Margaret Fuller. There was also the modernist movement which I consider a revival of the spirit in the revolt against form uh properly understood with some qualification but largely that's what the modernist movement was before in the mid 20th century sinking back down into a period of of closed circles.

So I'm defining a renaissance moment in history as any moment when the static closed circles of culture break open into an upward growth into an ascending spiral. Uh this this is going to start on the individual level before it's culturally collective. Many people ...