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Goethe's Faust
p 587 - “...a drama written by a poet who freely admitted that he found the charms of young women irresistible and who went on pursuing them when he was well into his seventies....”
“...Despite the several nineteenth-century efforts to make him into one, Goethe was not a orthodox Christian theologian, nor did he want to be seen as one. But he did want to be seen as standing, in some sense, within the Christian tradition -- and within the Classical tradition and within the humanistic tradition and within the scientific tradition!”
p 594 - “... Carl Gustav Carus, in a letter dated 26 December 1834: ‘And have you not often in spirit drawn the parallels between the great work of Dante and this work of Goethe? Except that in the former the most painful and most blessed conditions of the soul pass by the viewer (which is why it is called a “spectacle,” Divine Comedy), whereas in the latter the protagonist is constantly being moved and must restlessly pass through all the anguish and joy of life.’”
p 595 - From Faust, “The capacity for awe is the best feature of humanity. The world may extract a heavy payment for such feelings, but someone who had been stirred feels the Numinous profoundly” [lines 6272-74 but of a very different translation. Why are the other translations quoted here all so much better than this one ?]
Goethe in a letter “...For my part, I cannot be satisfied, amid the manifold directions of my being, with only one way of thinking. As a poet and an artist, I am a polytheist; on the other hand, I am a pantheist as a natural scientist -- and one of these as decisively as the other. And if I have need for one God for my personality as a moral man, that too [monotheist], is provided for.”
I don’t know who is here quoted, “...This is because ‘in reality, Goethe’s Faust has not in any way renounced God.... Therefore Faust is a God-seeker, not a God-denier.’ As Faust says to Margarete [Margarete=Gretchen] in his credo, ‘Who can perceive God and then presume to say:”I do not believe in him”? The All-comprehending, the All-preserving, does he not sustain and embrace you and me and himself?’ (3435-41).”
p 596-597 - “...For the three periods of his development in the drama correspond to the sequence of Goethe’s writing, beginning with the early ‘pantheistic’ sections belonging to the author’s original conception, continued with the ‘polytheism’ of Walpurgis Night and Classical Walpurgis Night as written in the first quarter of the 1800s, and closing with the ‘monotheism’ of the sections written near the end of Goethe’s life.”
“...The director in the Prelude at the Theater speaks about the drama as ‘a sort of ragout’ (100), and Faust uses the same word in the opening scene (539): a ragout cannot have only one ingredient...”
p 597 - “...the species of morality, and thus the definition of monotheism, through which Faust finds salvation, though it transcends both his scientific pantheism and his poetic polytheism, does so not by negating either of them but by fulfilling both of them and making them sublime... These nobler intents, higher aspirations, and earnest yearnings are the expression of an intellectual and spiritual ‘Eros, which started everything’ (8479) and which finds fulfillment in God....”
I was going to put something else here, but I seem to have set this up, so I'm going back to the Pacific War again.
Saipan
Everyone knows about D-Day and the Allied invasion of Normandy, but the total story is so much more amazing. The Normandy fleet first sailed on 4 June 1944, then returned because of bad weather, and finally sailed for real on 5 June. On the other side of the globe, another -- all American -- invasion fleet also sailed on 5 June for Saipan in the Marianas Island Chain. While the D-Day force included five battleships, twenty cruisers, and over 5,000 vessels of all kinds; the Marianas force included 15 battleships and 32 cruisers. While the D-Day landings were covered by aircraft flying from England, the Marianas invasion force included 15 fleet carriers plus 8 CVEs to provide air support for the Marines and infantry going ashore while also defending against enemy fleets that were bound to attack.
Only three reinforced divisions of Marines and infantry were committed to the Saipan invasion but they were to be followed by and supported by additional units bringing the troop total for the operation to 127,571 + the reserve 77th Infantry Div. At Normandy, over 156,000 were landed on the first day with hundreds of thousands more to follow in the coming weeks and months. But the remoteness of the Saipan battlefield made the invasion remarkably difficult. Instead of taking hours to cross the English Channel, the Saipan force took 10 days to sail across the Pacific.
And there was another huge difference between these battles. In Normandy the Germans fought desperately and casualties were high, but in the end the survivors retreated further into France and over 50,000 surrendered just at the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. On Saipan, the 30,000 defenders fought almost to the last man (only 921 surrendered) and even the Japanese civilians were encouraged by Imperial edict to seek glory in suicide rather than surrender.
The story I want to tell is not about the battles on land or at sea (in the air, really), I want to tell the usually ignored story of how the invasion forces gathered and approached the battle. This was the moment when all the plans the U.S. Navy had made since the mid ‘30s and all the sacrifices the navy had made in 1941 and 1942 finally paid off -- the perfect blending of the old and new navies. Old battleships, some re-floated after the Pearl Harbor attack, pounded the beaches and provided devastating artillery support when needed ashore. (This was true in Normandy as well. The USS Nevada was hit by bombs and run aground at Pearl Harbor yet she was one of three U.S. BBs supporting the invasion of France.) At sea, the new BBs, CVs, and CVLs held off the attacks of the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, eliminating the IJN's naval air power for the remainder of the war. This, though no one realized it at the time, was the "Decisive Battle" everyone had been planning for... it just didn't look the way they had anticipated. As at the Battle of the Coral Sea, no ship got within visual range of an enemy ship except for the U.S. submarines, which sank two Japanese aircraft carriers.
Another glorious victory in the war to make the world safe for the banksters
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