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Goethe's Faust
p 565 - Margaret Fuller - Her translation of the wager,
Canst thou by falsehood or by flattery
Make me one moment with myself at peace,
Cheat me into tranquility? Come then
And welcome, life’s last day.
Make me but to the moment say,
Oh, fly not yet, thou art so fair,
Then let me perish, &c.
p 568 - Emerson, “...He is the king of all scholars. In these days and in this country, where the scholars are few and idle, where men read easy books and sleep after dinner, it seems as if no book could so safely be put in the hands of young men as the letters of Goethe....”
“Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual...the poet of prose...”
Heine has the most interesting things to say here so I'm going to quote him at greater length:
“The German people in its profundity long ago intuitively surmised this: for the German people is itself that learned Doctor Faustus, that spiritualist who through his intellect has grasped the inadequacy of the intellect and demands material pleasures and restores to the flesh its rights; yet, still caught up in the symbolism of Catholic poetry where God is considered the representative of the spirit and the devil representative of the flesh, they characterized that reinstatement of the flesh as a fall from God, as an alliance with the devil.”
“It will still be some time, though, before what was prophesied with such profound meaning in that poem [Faust] materializes among the German people, before it understands, by the intellect itself, the usurpations of the intellect, and vindicates the rights of the flesh. That, then, will be the revolution, the great daughter of the Reformation.”
Ignoring for the moment any consideration of the unimaginable price the people of Europe paid for the Reformation -- the darkest period in the history of almost every nation, especially in the north, from France to England, to the Netherlands, to Bohemia and the rest of Germany -- let's move on to this, that I ran into just yesterday in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft: [keep in mind most of my notes here were written over a year ago]
“...we take for granted that if one religion passes away, another must arise. But what if man presently find himself without spiritual needs? Such modification of his being cannot be deemed impossible; many signs of our life to-day seems to point towards it. If the habits of thought favoured by physical science do but sink deep enough, and no vast calamity come to check mankind in its advance to material contentment, the age of true positivism may arise [See Brave New World] ... the word supernatural will have no sense; superstition will be a dimly understood trait for the early race; and where now we perceive an appalling Mystery, everything will be lucid and serene as a geometric demonstration. Such an epoch of Reason might be the happiest the world could know. Indeed, it would either be that, or it would never come about at all. For suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count very surely upon the rationalist millennium.”
The Gissing seems to me to set the stage for both Brave New World and The Elementary Particles. Both the Gissing and the Heine set the stage for The Magic Mountain. (And Heine is clearly one of those secular European "sirens" that Dostoyevsky believed were luring Russia to her doom.) All these books are really about the same thing. And Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, would trace this trend toward positivism and an emphasis on the scientific and on this world rather than the next, back to Socrates. But of all these writers, only Nietzsche really seems to have any confidence in the ultimate success of this trend. (Insert syphilis joke here.)
This may also be a good time to remind people that there is a Chronology at the end of the Introduction. I actually started working on that while researching Faust. Entries relating to so many other books have been added since then, but the original basic information, placing both the "historical" Faustus and Goethe in the context of Modern European history, remains.
In praise of SciFi
Over the course of my reading life, SciFi has been like jazz -- something I really like and, from time to time, consume in massive doses and then ignore for years at a time. When I feel my tear ducts need flushing out, I pick up one of Anne McCaffery’s “Ship who...” series. The original, The Ship Who Sang, and also The Ship Who Searched, have an uncanny ability to play with my emotions. (There must be something here similar to the emotional aspect of music that Mann writes about in Doctor Faustus. These stories are as dependable for me as is the "Ode to Joy.")
But as much as good SciFi is about telling good stories (like any good fiction) what sets it apart is the ideas -- the “science.” Good SciFi is almost always a kind of thought experiment: What would life be like if we could communicate or travel faster than the speed of light? In the case of McCaffery’s stories, what would life be like if we could take people with brilliant minds but bodies ruined by birth defects or disease and encapsulate them in a life-support “shell” and connect them directly to the sensors and instruments and controls of a space ship or space station. So that they could “become” the ship. How would they relate to the world, each other, and the humans who supported them?
In the past I’ve read most of the best known SciFi authors, even the not-as-popular ones who specialize in telling stories from non-human points of view, and I mean nothing like human. I wish I could find, or even better remember this author's name.
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is probably the first SciFi I read and for a long time Ursula K. Le Guin was my favorite author. The first four of her “Hainish Cycle” books are everything SciFi should be. (Her contributions to the thought experiment genre is the concept of “mind speech” where people can communicate mind to mind.) One of these novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, also does an amazing job of examining gender.
My next favorite author was Norman Spinrad. He was such a 1960s-1970s author I’m not sure how well his writing would hold up today. Of his titles my favorites were two that shared the same fictional ‘verse (as we would say today): The Void Captain's’ Tale and the amazing Child of Fortune. (Songs From the Stars would get an honorable mention.) If some young reader would agree only to reading a single SciFi title at my suggestion, I would go with Child of Fortune and not just because it is another massive book. This one novel contains so many uniquely imagined and different worlds that, as with Pulp Fiction, one tends to forget that the various parts belong to the same work. It’s probably no accident that Spinrad writes so much about drugs (and sex) because I just don’t believe a single, sober mind could dream up all these vivid and amazing worlds. (The colonized little world where each neighborhood decides on the strength of gravity and the brightness of the sun, among other things -- I seem to recall banzai volcanoes -- has stayed with me for decades.)
I need to say a few words about Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos series, though I’ve only read the first two titles: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Here cyberspace is one of the “worlds” the story takes place in. The conflict is between humans and a hierarchy of Artificial Intelligences (AIs) that human society has become dependent on. But the fun features are portals that connect two different places in space; so that a wealthy person can have a house on one planet that includes rooms on other planets. To give a terrestrial equivalent, you could have a house in Beijing with one balcony overlooking the Aegean from a Greek island and another balcony overlooking the Alps at Davos. There is also a spaceship built around a giant redwood tree.
Finally, there’s Ian Banks. Banks died a few years ago, which is part of what got me thinking about this. That and learning that Elon Musk named his robotic ship (the platform his first stage rockets are attempting to land on) “Just Read the Instructions.” I literally burst out laughing when I read that as it is so obviously a “Culture” reference. (The 2nd ship, still under construction I believe, is named "Of Course I Still Love You." I hadn’t realized these were “actual” ship names from The Player of Games) I’ve only actually read one Culture novel but a friend told me the plots of several others. The Culture is a phenomenally advanced civilization employing nanotechnology and god knows what else in very clever ways. In one memorable passage there is a Culture assassin who breaks up into what appears to be a swarm of insects (or mini-drones) and then reforms into a human shape. Here’s a nice summary from Wiki, “The main theme of the novels is the dilemmas that an idealistic hyperpower faces in dealing with civilisations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds repulsive. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of, or non-members of, the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of Culture plans to civilize the galaxy.”
But the fun thing in these novels is the names the powerful AI ships choose for themselves (see Here; but my favorites are: “No More Mr Nice Guy,” “Kiss My Ass," “Just Testing,” “Funny, It Worked Last Time...” oh, I give up. There are so many good ones).
Anyway, just another series of thought experiments... which would be a hell of a Culture ship name.
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