Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

The U.S. Department of Defense is attemping to create "an alternate reality holding a complex matrix with billions of individual 'nodes' to reflect every man, woman and child in the real world."
The system, or Matrix, is set to be called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS) that is quoted to be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information."

'Can't you just see the ghosts?' she said to Lady Circumference on the stairs. 'Pit and Fox and Burke and Lady Hamilton and Beau Brummel and Dr Johnson' (a concurrence of celebrities, it may be remarked, at which something memorable might surely have occurred). 'Can't you just see them - in their buckled shoes?'

Friedrich Christian Accum, A treatise on adulterations of food, and culinary poisons: exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionery, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy and methods of detecting them. London: Printed by J. Mallett, ... sold by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820.

In his Metaphysics L1 (dating from around 1778-80), Kant wrote: "The thought of Swedenborg on this matter [the existence of two worlds] is quite sublime. He says: the spirit world composes a special real universe; this is the mundus intelligiblis [intelligible world\, from which this mundus sensibilis [sensible world] must be distinguished."

Coleridge works his way towards the beginnings of a unified theory, the "great law of the imagination", that "a likeness in part tends to become a likeness of the whole": the brain is always busy recognizing, replicating, expanding, extemporizing and filling in the gaps. Under the right circumstances, humble decanters and inkstands can morph into human or demonic entities at which point they may do anything that such entities might be expected to do: walk, speak, wear evening dress or waggle their pointed tails [...] but, having tantalized himself and the reader, Coleridge announces reluctantly that he is unable to do it justice. "I have long wished to devote an entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts and witchcraft", he insists, and "I have indeed a memorandum-book filled with records of these phaenomena, many of them interesting as facts and data for psychology, and affording some valuable materials for a theory of perception and its dependence on memory and the imagination."

Vile Bodies caught the public fancy for extraneous reasons. 'The Bright Young People' with whom it deals, and of whom I was a member rather on the fringe than in the centre, were one of the newspaper topics of the time. [...] The jargon most of us spoke came new to the novel reader and so captivated one prominent dramatic critic that for weeks he introduced into articles week after week: '"Too sick-making", as Mr Waugh would say.'

At week-ends they would swoop down from Oxford or London in merry hordes, to be greeted with solid disapproval by my mother and furious glares by my father.
Boud, Debo and I were on the whole carefully insulated from Nancy's friends, as my mother considered them a totally bad influence. "What a set!" she always said when some of their more outrageous ideas were expounded by Nancy. They talked in the jargon of their day: "Darling, too too divine, too utterly sickmaking, how shamemaking!" Fascinated I would hang around in the drawing-room as much as I dared, until my presence was noticed and I was chased back up to the schoolroom...
A high point in my life came when Evelyn Waugh, a writer feller and one of the main Swinbrook sewers, promised me that he would immortalize Miranda by substituting the word "sheepish" for the standard "divine" in his forthcoming book Vile Bodies.

The oddly chosen battleground of Nancy's generation was that of the Athletes versus the Aesthetes - sometimes called the Hearties and the Arties - and the newspapers were full of accounts of pitched warfare staged at Oxford University between these opposing forces.
The Athletes, of course, were direct ideological descendants of past patriots, winners of wars on the playing fields of Eton, Old School Tie men and their horsey-set women.
The Aesthetes laid claim to a more exotic heritage...the Romantics, the England of Oscar Wilde, the France of Baudelaire and Verlaine. Most of the Aesthetes were vaguely pro-Socialist, pro-pacifist, and (horrors!) opposed to shooting, hunting and fishing on the grounds that these hallowed blood sports were cruel and sadistic. They gaily toppled the old, uncomplicated household gods - England, Home and Glory, the Divine Right of Kings (and hence the House of Lords), the axiomatic superiority of the English over all other races...

(Someone has probably made a study of berries in the German imagination but, if not, it is a subject worthy of attention. I can think of no culture in which the words, Erdbeeren, Himbeeren, Brombeeren, Stachelbeeren, as well as the fruits, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, have so deep a resonance and are more closely associated with place, memory and longing.)