I discovered through social media that it was World Book Day last month. It is one of those quirks of modern life that I find absolutely mind numbing. Are we so uncultured that we need to have a World Book Day to remind us what a gift great literature & reading is? It reminds me a bit of a conversation I had with someone a few weeks after Prince had died, & the chap I was talking to said he had heard so much Prince on the radio in the wake of his death - an artist who he in fact claimed to love - that he had forgotten just how amazing his songs were. My reaction was a bit like Monty's in Withnail & I when Withnail's friend - the "I" in the film's title - says that he can sleep anywhere he likes & Monty replies, "Errrr..." (I guess you have to have seen it to get the gag). Anyway, my point is that I trust that I shall never need one of my great musical loves to pass away & then hear them played on the radio for me to remember just how great they are. The music I love is with me constantly. Whilst I'm doing my meds & other treatments. In the morning, before I go to sleep, in the car on the way to hospital, on my headphones in the hospital treatment room whilst waiting for different specialists to arrive; it means the world to me so it is a constant as every note is so precious. And so is my love of literature & reading. And a few weeks ago, I started reading Goethe's Faust again for the first time in about twenty years. And some of his other stuff, too: The Bride of Corinth, some of his essays on art, & selections from his Erotic Poems. And the thing that stood out for me was just how in love with life Goethe truly was. I knew this already, of course, but reading him at this time in our cultural history, when a New Puritanism is slowly but surely enveloping us all in its anti-life cloak, I was struck by just how strong an antidote to the ascetic mafia he really is. His writings are full of praise for the sensual life. He himself was a gigantic force of nature, & he found the idea of his own death impossible to fathom, genuinely believing that nature would provide him with another body once the one he had that was called 'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe' finally gave out, such was the enthusiasm for life that beat in his soul. At the age of 72 he fell hopelessly in love with the 17 year old Ulrike von Levetzow & asked her to marry him & was devastated when she rejected him. Whereas I see this as a sign of his wondrous lust for life, nowadays it would no doubt be dismissed as creepy & he would probably be called out as a dirty old man on the covers of our ever so gallant moral guardians The Daily Mail & The Sun. I suppose we should thank the heavens that we have those spotless publications & purveyors of truth & justice to keep us on track! And he was much more than just a writer & poet. He studied plants, designed a scientific Theory of Colours, & for a time was part of the court at Weimar. He travelled to Italy & wrote a Diary about his time there & was a society man, a lover, & a husband. He wrote plays for the stage & was a theatre director as well. And as I mentioned before, although he was writing in the late eighteenth & early nineteenth centuries, he seems particularly modern, especially when compared with our current, conservative times. I love for instance the fact that he didn't believe in a National Literature, but in a World Literature ("Weltliteratur"), a term he himself invented. Goethe's thoughts on such matters are far removed from today's Conservative sensation, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who complains that "we have been withdrawing from our tradition - religion - and even nation-centred cultures." Such sentiments would have been anathema to the cosmopolitan Goethe. And I can actually almost forgive myself for only being able to read Goethe in translation when I recall how he himself preferred a French translation of his own Faust, & when on reading it was struck by "how much brighter & more deliberately constructed" it was than his own German original. In art, he believed, as did Oscar Wilde, that beauty reveals the soul of the artist & that art is created from the artist's desperate struggle for self-expression. When Goethe eloped to Italy - he basically had to make a secret dawn departure as everybody he knew in Weimar would have tried to detain him if they'd known of his plans - he felt completely liberated by the Italian approach to life. In Rome he was free from the constraints of his tasks at the court of Weimar & he was able to devote himself to observing the beauty of art & nature. He met beautiful women in Rome society & although it is unclear whether rumours that he had a wild affair with a famous widow are true or not, on his return to Germany he wrote a group of poems entitled Roman Elegies which could easily scandalise middle class puritan society even now, with their glorious, life affirming descriptions of the pleasures (& the insecurities) of sex & sensuality. In poems such as The Bride of Corinth, he writes of the importance of enjoying the gifts that nature offers us, as the hero of the poem tells Corinth, surrounded as they are by a bounty of food & drink (and a bed!):
"Ceres - the goddess of agriculture - & Bacchus - the god of wine
Their splendid gifts to us they are bringing.
What you yourself bring is sweet Amor - love - that wondrous delight.
Now let us praise
These joyous gods, & their gifts, with our glad appetite!"
And he also sees the connections between the natural world & humanity, writing about the wonders & magic of the natural world. And in this vertiginous age we are living through - where we are slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) destroying the climate that enables life on earth to survive due to our disregard for non human life forms & the planet itself, Goethe gives his character Faust these few beautiful lines, where Faust thanks the Spirit of Life for giving him consciousness & meditates on the connections that are part of all species:
"You gave me, sublime Spirit, all I asked of you.
You gave me glorious nature as my kingdom,
And the power to feel it & delight in it...
I learned to know my brother creatures here,
In the quiet woods, in the streams & in the air."
I first read Goethe many years ago as a late teen, & he has always been on heavy rotation on my reading list. Yet somehow, something of his modernness seems to become more apparent every time I pick up one of his books. He is an author I am glad to have as a guide & teacher in my life, if for nothing other than how he reminds me that we should be grateful for so much of the beauty & colour in our lives. He didn't have much time for people who preach one thing yet do the other, suggesting that it's what you think & do - not just what you say - that defines who you are as a person. For as Goethe himself wrote, "To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking." He also stresses the importance of being open to new possibilities, believing that not being constrained by who you think you are or what you think you are supposed to be, will lead to a richer, ever changing experience of life. And that to remain unchanged through life is perhaps not really living at all & is closer to a form of living death. The shedding of parts of our personalities as we get older so as to become something new he would undoubtedly see as a positive. He doesn't say that any of this will be easy, but that even the struggle is worth it. And in conclusion, that allowing your soul to open up to the world would be one of the best ways to get the most out of this strange, mysterious thing called life.
August Macke, Oriental Women, 1912
Works Cited:
Goethe, J.W. The Essential Goethe. Princeton University Press (2016)
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/
