Jump to Introduction + Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Doctor Faustus - chapter IX
p80 During his last year at school, in the highest form, Leverkuhn in addition to everything else began to study Hebrew, which was not obligatory and which I did not pursue. Thus he betrayed the direction of his plans for a profession: it “turned out” ... that he intended to study theology... confessing at the same time that he did not envisage his choice as preparation for taking a parish and assuming a cure of souls, but as an academic career.
...The ambition I cherished on his account was absolute. And yet a shudder went through me when I divined -- divined very clearly -- that he had made his choice out of arrogance.
We had on occasion agreed, of course, or more correctly we had both espoused the general view, that philosophy was the queen of the sciences. Among them, we had affirmed, she took a place like that of the organ among instruments: she afforded a survey; she combined them intellectually, she ordered and refined the issues of all the fields of research into a universal picture, an overriding and decisive synthesis comprehending the meaning of life, a scrutinizing determination of man’s place in the cosmos. My consideration of my friend’s future, my thoughts about a “profession” for him, had always led me to similar conclusions. The many-sidedness of his activities, while they had made me anxious for his health, his thirst for experience, accompanied as it was by a critical attitude, justified such dreams. The most universal field, the life of a masterly polyhistor and philosopher seemed to me just right for him -- and further my powers of imagination had not brought me. Now I was to learn that he on his side had privately gone much further...
No wonder I like Mann.
p81 But there is, if you like, a discipline in which Queen Philosophy becomes the servant, the ancillary science, academically speaking a subsidiary branch of another; and that other is theology. Where love of wisdom lifts itself to contemplation of the highest essence, the source of being, the study of God and the things of God, there, one might say, is the peak of scientific dignity, the highest and noblest sphere of knowledge, the apex of all thinking; to the inspired intellect its most exalted goal is here set. The most exalted because here the profane sciences, for instance my own, philology, as well as history and the rest, become a mere tool for the service of knowledge of the divine -- and again, the goal to be pursued in the profoundest humility, because in the words of the Scriptures it is “higher than all reason” and the human spirit thereby enters into a more pious, trusting bond than that which any other of the learned professions lays upon him.
I will put the blame for this on Zeitblom.
...If he had made it [his decision] out of an instinct of spiritual self-discipline, out of the wish to hedge in by a religious profession that cool and ubiquitous intellect of his, which grasped everything so easily and was so spoilt by its own superiority -- then I should have agreed. It would not only have tranquillized my indefinite concern... and moreover it would have touched me deeply, for the sacrficium intellectus [sacrifice of the intellect (to faith)], which of necessity contemplation and knowledge of the other world carries with it, must be esteemed the more highly, the more powerful the intellect that makes it. But I did not at bottom believe in my friend’s humility. I believed in his pride, of which for my part I was proud too, and could not doubt that it was the source of his decision. Hence the mixture of joy and concern, the grounds of the shudder that went through me.
p82 ...Certainly, in relation to theology and the service of God, music -- of course like all the arts, and also the secular sciences, but music in particular -- took on an ancillary, auxiliary character. The thought was associated in my mind with certain discussions which we had had on the destiny of art, on the one hand very conducive, but on the other sadly hampering; we referred to her emancipation from cult, her cultural secularization. It was all quite clear to me: his choice had been influenced by his personal desire and his professional prospects, the wish to reduce music again to the position that once, in times he considered happier, she had held in the union of cults. Like the profane disciplines, so likewise music: he would see them all beneath the sphere to which he would dedicate himself as adept...
p83 ...Had Kaisersaschern ever released him? Did he not take her with him wherever he went and was he not conditioned by her whenever he thought to decide? What is freedom? Only the neutral is free. The characteristic is never free, it is stamped, determined, bound. Was it not “Kaisersaschern” that spoke in my friend’s decision to study theology? Adrian Leverkuhn and Kaisersaschern: obviously the two together yielded theology... He devoted himself later to musical composition. But if it was very bold music he wrote, was it after all “free” music, world music? That it was not. It was the music of one who never escaped; it was, into its most mysterious, inspired, bizarre convolution, in every hollow breath and echo it gave out, characteristic music, music of Kaisersascher.
... Dr. Stoientin, who had been Adrian’s master in Greek, Middle High German, and Hebrew, did not fail at their private leave-taking to utter a word of warning.
“Vale,” [farewell] he said, “and God be with you Leverkuhn. -- The parting blessing comes from my heart, and whether you are of that opinion or not, it seems to me you may need it. You are a person richly gifted and you know it -- as why should you not? You know too that He above, from whom all comes, gave you your gifts, for to Him you now offer them. You are right: natural merits are God’s merits in us, not our own. It is His foe who, fallen through pride himself, would teach us to forget. He is evil to entertain, a roaring lion who goes about seeking whom he may devour. You are among those who have reason to be on guard against his wiles. It is a compliment I am paying you, or rather to what you are from God. Be it in humility, my friend, not in defiance or with boasting; and be ever mindful that self-satisfaction is like a falling away and unthankfulness against the Giver of all mercies!”
...Well I remember the talks we had as we strolled, about Stoientin’s warning, especially about the expression “native merit” which he had used in his farewell. Adrian pointed out that he took it from Goethe, who enjoyed using it, and also “inborn merits,” seeking in the paradoxical combination to divorce from the word “merit” its moral character, and, conversely, exalt the natural and inborn to a position of extra-moral, aristocratic desert. That was why he was against claims of modesty which were always put forward by those disadvantaged by nature, and declared that “Only good-for-nothings are modest.” But Director Stoientin had used Goethe’s words more in Schiller's sense, to whom everything had depended on freedom, and who therefore distinguished in a moral sense between talent and personal merit, sharply differentiating merit and fortune, which Goethe considered to be inextricably interwoven. The director followed Schiller, when he called nature God and native talent the merit of God in us, which we were to wear in humility.
p84 “The Germans,” said the new undergraduate, a grass blade in his mouth, “have a two-track mind with an inexcusable habit of combination; they always want one thing and the other, they want to have it both ways. They are capable of turning out great personalities with antithetic principles of thought and life. But then they muddle them, using the coinage of the one in the sense of the other; mixing everything all up and thinking they can put freedom and aristocracy, idealism and natural childlikeness under one hat. But that probably does not do.”
“But they have both in themselves,” I retorted; “otherwise they could not have exhibited both of them. A rich nation.”
“A confused nation,” he persisted, “and bewildering for the others.”
I think it would be close to the turn of the century (1903 in fact) when Adrian quits Kaisersaschern for the University at Halle.
I’m at a new location of a coffee place I’ve liked for many years. They have the nicest cafe tables I’ve ever seen. There is an oak frame to the top with mitered corners, but most of the tabletop is bamboo. But not just any bamboo, while most of the surface is composed of the usual small, lengthwise cut bamboo strips, there is a design formed from smaller, much darker pieces cut so you see the end grain. The side edges of the top are also primarily end grain bamboo pieces. Really nice.
Now someone with a dog has joined us in the cafe despite the prominent sign asking that dogs not be brought into the cafe (health regulations prohibit it). The owner apologized -- when his dog came over to sniff my bag (I picked it up to place on a chair out of his reach) and I gave him the stink eye... or at least I intended to. (This is a very puntable doglet.)
All this is odd since I don’t really care about dogs being inside -- having grown up with dogs it doesn’t bother me and I actually prefer places like Scotland where dogs seem to have equal rights. But my German genes protest at the idiot owners who don’t think the rules apply to them.
A word on the paper... I mean the paper my edition of Doctor Faustus is printed on. I have not mentioned it before because I never noticed it, but here I am sitting in the window and the sun is shining in from in front of me and to my right, bathing my book in a particularly revealing light. This edition is old, 1948, with deckle edges (intended to resemble books where, when new, you have to cut each page with a knife?) -- now slightly browned by time. But the paper itself, in this light, is quite irregular, or at least it isn’t smooth and white as you might expect. There is a pleasing texture to it and a certain horizontal pattern that doesn’t exactly match the lines of text stamped upon it.
The puntable curr has moved outside (perhaps my stink eye was better than I realized) and is now barking his head off at something or other.
No comments:
Post a Comment