Chapter 5 immortal(5)

Chapter two 1 September 13th, 1811.For the third week the poet Achim von Arnim and his young bride, Bettina ne Brentano, lived at Goethe's house in Weimar.Bettina was twenty-six, Arnim thirty, Goethe's wife Christiana was forty-nine, and Goethe was sixty-two, too old to have a tooth left.Arnim loved his young wife, Christiane her old gentleman, but Bettina continued to flirt with Goethe after her marriage.This morning, Goethe was alone at home, and Christiane accompanied the couple to an art exhibition (arranged by their family friend, Privy Councilor Meir), which included some paintings that Goethe had admired.Madame Christiane did not know art, but she remembered Goethe's praises, so she could calmly take Goethe's opinions as her own.Hearing Christian Wan's authoritative voice, Arnim looked at Bettina's glasses on the bridge of her nose again.The glasses jerk up and down whenever she sniffs her nose like a rabbit.Arnim understood the meaning of the gesture: Bettina was about to explode.He seemed to sense that a storm was coming, so he slipped cautiously into the next room.

As soon as he left, Bettina interrupted Christiana: Don't talk nonsense, she can't agree at all!These paintings are terrible! Christiana was also furious: first of all, this young noble lady, married and pregnant, dared to flirt with her husband; what was even more intolerable was that she dared to disobey his opinions.What on earth is she trying to do?To be a leader supporting Goethe and at the same time being a leader against Goethe?Either of these two things made her choked with anger; what was even more unbearable was that, logically speaking, the two were incompatible.Therefore, she resolutely declared that such an outstanding painting must not be described as extremely bad.

But Bettina reacted by not only declaring them terrible, but adding that the paintings were absurd!Yes, they are downright ridiculous!She also listed a series of arguments to support this view. Christiana listened, she couldn't understand what the woman meant.The more excited Bettina became, the more she used words she had learned from her young college friends, and Christiana thought she used them as an insult to what she didn't understand.She watched Bettina's glasses slide up and down the bridge of her nose, and felt that her difficult language and her glasses were the same thing.In fact, Bettina wearing glasses is a great thing!Because everyone knows that Goethe condemned the wearing of glasses in public as a sign of low taste and eccentricity!So if Bettina insisted on wearing spectacles in Weimar, she was brazenly trying to show that she belonged to a younger generation, a generation characterized by romanticism and spectacles.And we all know what these people say when they proudly identify with the younger generation: when their father and brother (in Bettina's case, Christiane's Goethe) are already buried in the ground with wild chrysanthemums on their heads, They are still full of life.

Bettina talked on and on, and she was getting more and more excited.Christiana suddenly flew up and slapped her face.It was too late and then fast, and she suddenly realized that she shouldn't hit the guest.She hastily withdrew her hand, but her fingertips still wiped Bettina's forehead.Bettina's glasses fell to the ground and shattered into several pieces.All through the gallery everyone turned and looked at each other; poor Arnim, running back from the next room, crouched down to pick up the pieces, as if trying to glue them back together. Everyone waited tensely for several hours, waiting for Goethe's verdict.Which side will he be on when he hears the whole story?

Goethe sided with Christiane and never allowed the two young men to set foot in his house again. A wine glass is broken, it symbolizes good luck.A mirror shatters, and you'll be unlucky for seven years.What about a broken pair of glasses?It means war.Bettina went through Weimar's salons and announced: "That fat sausage is crazy, she bit me!" The words spread to everyone, and the whole of Weimar burst out laughing.This immortal famous saying, this immortal laughter, still echoes in our ears until our time. ① Achim von Arnim (1781-1831), German writer, treats people. 2 immortal.Goethe was not afraid of the word.His autobiography "My Life" has a famous subtitle - "Poetry and Truth" (Dichtung und Wahrheit), which writes about the stage curtain of the Neue Theater in Dresden, which he saw for the first time at the age of nineteen. I have made a careful investigation.Its background (I quote from Goethe's own account) shows the scene of Der Tempel des Ruhmes (Der Tempel des Ruhmes), surrounded by successive generations of playwrights.In the center is "a man in a light cloak" who strides "as if no one else is there; he is seen only from the back, and he looks like no one else. This man is thought to be Shakespeare, He has no predecessors to imitate, and he doesn't care about the masterpieces of the past, he walks alone and goes straight to immortality."

Of course, what Goethe meant by immortality is not the same as the religious belief in the immortality of the soul.What we are talking about here is another kind of immortality, which is more secular, that is, living in the memory of posterity after death.Immortality of varying degrees and durations is available to all, and people have learned this since childhood.For example, they used to speak of a magistrate in a Moravian village, to which I used to go on excursions as a boy, who had at home an open coffin into which he would lie down in moments of self-satisfaction, imagining Funeral scene.It was the best moment of his life, lying in his coffin and letting his thoughts wander: this is the contemplation of one's own immortality.

When it comes to immortality, people are naturally not equal.We must make a distinction. One is the so-called general immortality, the nostalgia for a person among acquaintances (the kind of immortality that parents and officials in villages and towns yearn for); In the heart of the people.There are paths in life that confront this great immortality from the very beginning, not necessarily sure but certainly possible: they are the paths of the artist and the political activist. Of the statesmen in Europe today, the one most concerned with his own immortality is François Mitterrand.I still remember the memorable celebrations after he was elected president in 1981.The square in front of the Pantheon was filled with cheering crowds, but he was not among them: he walked up the broad steps alone (just like Shakespeare on the curtain as described by Goethe walking towards the Hall of Fame), holding three plants Rose.In a short while, hiding from the sight of the crowd, he gathered alone with the corpses of sixty-four prominent figures. He was lost in thought, followed only by the lens of photographers and cameras, and of course millions of French people , They watched his every move through the TV screen.Beethoven's Ninth Symphony sounded like lightning and thunder on the TV at the same time, and he placed roses one by one in front of the three pre-selected mausoleums.Like a civil surveyor, he planted the three roses to delimit this eternal edifice, and they marked out a triangular site, in the center of which would be built his immortal palace.

His predecessor, President Valery Guiscard des Dans, invited a cleaner to have breakfast with him at the Élysée Palace.It is nothing more than a gesture of the sentimental bourgeois to win the love of the common people and convince them that he is one of them.Mitterrand was not naive enough to want to be a cleaner; (no president can achieve that dream!) He wanted to imitate the dead.This is much wiser indeed, because death and immortality are inseparable, and whoever's face matches that of a deceased person in our minds is immortal in his lifetime. I have always liked the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. Once I saw him jogging with a group of staff, coaches, and guards on TV. I felt that the liking in my heart almost reached the point of love; His complexion also changed, and his jogging companions rushed to support him: a mild myocardial infarction.The purpose of jogging is to let the whole country see the president's youth forever, so a photographer was invited.As a result, instead of seeing the vigorous athlete, everyone saw the misfortune of an elderly man. Of course, this is not the fault of the photographer.

A man longs for immortality, but one day the cameras will show us a pitiful grin—the only thing we remember about him, the only thing left of his parabolic life.He's going to go into some kind of immortality, but we're going to call it ludicrous.Tecio Bra was a great astronomer, but we remember only one thing about him today: at a court dinner, he swelled his wrist because he was ashamed to go to the toilet, and died as a Martyrs for face and piss rank among the ridiculous immortals.This is exactly the same as Christiane Goethe, who was immortalized forever as a crazy biting sausage.Of the novelists I was most intimate with was Robert Musil, who died one morning while lifting weights.Therefore, when I was lifting weights, I kept measuring my pulse, for fear of falling to the ground and dying. If I died holding a bell like the writer I respect, then I would become a great imitator, because I couldn’t believe it. I will immediately join the ranks of the absurd Immortals.

① Tecio Bra (1546-1601), Danish astronomer, teacher of famous astronomer Kepler. 3 If one imagines that there were video cameras (like the one that immortalized Jimmy Carter) as far back as Rudolph the Great, a palace feast was filmed, and Tecio Bulla writhed in his chair, pale , legs clamped and sometimes relaxed, staring at the ceiling and rolling his eyes.Had he realized that millions of spectators were watching him, he would have suffered more, and the laughter in the corridors of the Temple of the Immortal, where he stood, would have sounded louder.People are sure to demand a rerun of the famous astronomer's piss-shaming scene every New Year's Eve, because everyone wants to laugh and there are so few funny things.

This leads me to a question: Has the immortality of the camera age changed?I can answer without hesitation: basically unchanged; because the photographic lens existed long before it was invented, its dematerialized essence existed long before it was invented.Even when there is no camera on, people behave the same as they do when they are caught on camera.Goethe was not surrounded by a group of photographers at that time, but he was surrounded by the photographer's shadow projected from the depths of the future.This happened, for example, during the famous visit to Napoleon, when the Pope, who was at the height of his power at that time, summoned the heads of European countries to a meeting in Eife and asked them to agree to the division between him and the Russian Tsar. sphere of influence. Napoleon was a true Frenchman, he didn't want to see hundreds of thousands die, he wanted to be praised by writers.He asked his cultural consultant to list the most influential intellectuals in Germany at that time, the most important of which was Goethe.Goethe!Napoleon patted his forehead. Author of The Sorrows of Young Werther!During the Egyptian campaign, he found that all his officers were fascinated by this book.Knowing what the book contained, he was furious.The officers were scolded.They read such limp nonsense, and he decreed that no one should ever touch novels, any novels!It would be much more useful to have them read a little history!But this time, now that he knew who Goethe was, he decided to invite him to have a look.He was actually willing to do so, too, since his advisers told him that Goethe was first and foremost a playwright.Napoleon preferred plays to novels.Drama reminded him of fighting.One of the greatest war planners in his own right, he was an unrivaled director.In his heart of hearts he believed himself to be the greatest tragic poet who ever lived, greater than Sophocles, greater than Shakespeare. Cultural consultants are capable people, but they often get things mixed up.Goethe was indeed interested in the theater, but his reputation had nothing to do with it.In the mind of Napoleon's adviser, Goethe must have been confused with Frederick Schiller.Since Schiller and Goethe had a close relationship, it is not too big a mistake to combine the two good friends into one poet; perhaps, perhaps this is the deliberate act of the adviser, who wanted to take Napoleon's consideration and put The didactic intent of German classicism combined in the figure of Frederick Johann Goldschiel is to be admired. When Goethe (who never imagined himself to be Goethe Schiller) received the invitation, he knew he had to accept it this time.He was just sixty years old, and death was approaching him, and with death came immortality (as I said, death and immortality are an inseparable pair, more than Marx and Engels, Romeo and Juliet, Laurel and Hardy are still close), Goethe must consider that he is invited to an immortal.So even though he was busy working on Color Theory, which he considered the culmination of his oeuvre, he left his desk work and headed straight for Ivor.It was here on October 2, 1808, that an unforgettable meeting between the immortal commander and the immortal poet took place. ① According to the plot in the book, it should be the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612). 4 Surrounded by the shadows of the photographers, Goethe ascended a broad flight of stairs, accompanied by Napoleon's valet, up another flight of stairs, through corridors and into a large drawing room.At the very top of the living room, Napoleon was sitting at a round table having breakfast.Sergeants in uniform came and went, handing him various reports from various directions, and he gave short replies one by one, chewing non-stop.It took several minutes before the attendant dared to step forward to signal that Goethe had arrived, and he was standing motionless in the distance at this moment.Napoleon glanced at it, and slowly slipped his right hand under his jacket, palm touching his lower left rib. (In the past, he often had stomach pains. He developed such a habit. Over time, he fell in love with this pose. Whenever he found himself surrounded by photographers, he couldn't help posing in this pose, as if asking for help from the gods.) He hurried Swallowing the food in his mouth, (chewing makes the face distorted, it is not suitable for photography, and the newspapers always publish such pictures with ulterior motives!) Raise your voice, and say something that everyone can hear: "He is the man you want!" This kind of words is the kind of "loud words" that people often say today.Politicians always shamelessly repeat a meaning when they make long speeches. They know very well that repeating or not repeating is the same. For ordinary people, except for a few words quoted by journalists, they can't remember anything else.In order to facilitate the work of journalists, to give them a hint, politicians insert one or two simple and funny words that have not been used before in the speeches that are similar to each other. This trick is so unexpected that these words immediately spread. And go, a household name.The whole art of doing politics these days is no longer in politics (everyone’s business depends on the unknown and ungraspable logic in their own mechanism), but in coming up with "sounding words", whether a politician can be seen and accepted by others People understand that how to evaluate in public opinion polls, and whether they can be selected in the end, all depend on these "big words".Goethe did not yet understand the term "sounding words", but before any thing is materialized and named, its essence already exists.Goethe immediately discovered that the few words Napoleon had just said were just extraordinary "sounding words" that would be of great use to both of them in the future.Overjoyed, he took a step closer to Napoleon's dining table. You can say what you want about the immortality of poets, but military commanders are more immortal figures, so it is only natural that Napoleon and not Goethe ask first: "How old are you?" he asked. "Sixty," replied Goethe. "You look fine for your age," said Napoleon (he was twenty years younger) approvingly.Goethe couldn't help being flattered.He was overweight and had a double chin by the time he was fifty, but he didn't pay much attention to it.As he grew older, thoughts of imminent death appeared frequently, and he began to realize that it was possible to become immortal with such a terrible belly.He decided to lose weight, and soon became slender, not beautiful, but at least reminiscent of his handsome and dashing image in the past. "Are you married?" asked Napoleon sincerely. "Yes." Goethe bowed. "Do you have any children?" "A son." At this moment, a general leaned forward to Napoleon and announced an important message, and Napoleon fell into deep thought.He took out his right hand from under the vest, poked a small piece of meat with a fork and stuffed it into his mouth (this scene is no longer filmed), and answered while chewing.It took a while to think of Goethe again, and he asked sincerely, "Are you married?" "Yes." Goethe bowed. "Have any children?" "A son," replied Goethe. "Then let's talk about Karl August." Napoleon suddenly called out the name of the prince of the Grand Duchy of Weimar. Goethe was his citizen, and he obviously didn't like this person. Goethe couldn't speak ill of his own sovereign, but he couldn't argue with an immortal, so he had to talk about him, saying that Karl August was a great supporter of art and science.The topic of art and science stopped the immortal commander from chewing. He stood up from the table, put his hand in his waistcoat, took a few steps towards the poet, and began to express his views on the theater.At this moment, the group of invisible photographers woke up, and the cameras clicked and clicked. The commander who pulled the poet aside to have a heart-to-heart talk had to raise his voice so that everyone in the hall could hear it.He suggested that Goethe should write a play about the Eife conference, because this conference would guarantee that mankind finally entered an era of peace and happiness."The theater must be a school for the people," he declared loudly. (This is already the second great "sounding word" in Tomorrow's Daily.) "If you dedicate this play to Tsar Alexander," he rephrased Added in a softer tone, "That would be a brilliant idea!" (Actually, the Eiffel meeting was held for this man! He was the man Napoleon needed to win over!) Then he gave the Goetheschian a literary question. I had a brief lesson.In the meantime, his speech and thoughts were interrupted by a servant delivering a report.In order to continue, he had to leave the context, repeat twice again, not sure of himself, "theatre-the school of the people", and then (ah! thank you! he finally found the train of thought!) he mentioned Vol. Ertai's "The Death of Caesar".In Napoleon's view, the drama poet lost the opportunity to become the teacher of the people, which is a typical example.He should show in this play that the great commander is concerned about the happiness of mankind, but his short life has failed to make him realize this ideal. The last words sound a bit sad. The commander looked into the poet's eyes and said: "Look Here, here's a great theme for you!" Then, he was interrupted again.The senior generals came to the hall, and Napoleon drew his arm from under his waistcoat and sat back at the table.He poked a piece of meat with a fork and dropped it into his mouth, chewing as he listened to the report.The figures of the photographers disappeared from the hall.Goethe looked around, looked at the paintings on the wall, and after a while, he went to the attendant who had brought him in, and asked him if the audience was over.The attendant nodded, and the fork put another piece of meat into Napoleon's mouth, and Goethe left. ① Archduke Carl August (1775-1828), monarch of the Weimar Duchy. ② Tsar Alexander, here refers to Tsar Alexander I of Russia (1777-1825). ③ Voltaire (1694-1778), French Enlightenment thinker, philosopher, and writer.