Chapter 7 immortal(7)

9 On September thirteenth, Bettina broke her glasses, which she considered a great humiliation.At first her reaction was to avenge the blow by announcing to the whole of Weimar that she had been bitten by a mad sausage, but she soon realized that her persistence would prevent her from ever seeing Goethe again, And the immortality she strives for will be turned into a small episode and be forgotten.So she asked the kind Arnim to write a letter to Goethe, in which he tried to apologize on her behalf.But this letter never received a reply.The young couple left Weimar.They came here again in January 11812, but Goethe refused to receive them.In 1816, Christiane died.Soon Bettina wrote another long letter to Goethe, which was full of self-blame and apology.Goethe, however, still did not answer.In 1821, ten years after their last meeting, she visited Weimar again and entered Goethe's house uninvited.That night coincided with Goethe's meeting with guests, so there was no way to keep her out.But even so, he still didn't make a single word conversation with her.In December of the same year, she wrote to him again, but there was still no reply.

In 1823, the Frankfurt City Council decided to erect a monument to Goethe and commissioned a sculptor named Rauch to implement the project.Bettina saw the model of the monument, and she did not like it; but she realized at once that fate had presented her with another opportunity, which she must not let go.Although she had no talent for painting, she worked overnight and sketched the statue she designed: Goethe in a seated position, like a classical hero; he held a lyre; between his knees; his hair was like flames.She sent the sketch to Goethe, and a surprising thing happened: tears came to Goethe's eyes!Thus, at last, after thirteen years (July, 1824, when he was seventy-five and she was thirty-nine), he received her at home, agreeing that, despite his stubbornness, everything would be all right. Forgive me, that unfriendly silence is a thing of the past.

It seems to me that, at this stage of the story, the two protagonists clearly come to a conscious understanding of the situation before them: they both know what the other is up to, and they both know that the other knows the same.With this sketch, Bettina made it clear for the first time what the game was meant to achieve from the start: Immortality.Bettina didn't mention the word, she just rubbed it lightly, like we flick a taut string and let it vibrate long and silently.Goethe heard it.At first he was foolishly flattered, but gradually (after wiping away the tears) he began to grasp the real (not all flattering) meaning of Bettina's words: she wanted him to know that the old game was still going on; And she is the best person to sew him a shroud, which Goethe will wear in front of posterity; no one can stop her, especially his obstinate silence .He thought again of his old saying from earlier: Bettina was dangerous, and it was best to keep an eye on her genially.

Bettina knew that Goethe knew.This can be seen in another meeting of theirs that autumn; in a letter to his nephew, she described him: Shortly after that meeting, "Goethe began to quarrel with me, but then he Soothe me with kind words to regain my favor." Do we still misunderstand him!He was fully aware that she was the one who disturbed him, and he hated himself for wasting thirteen years of cultivation.So he quarreled with her, as if he wanted to vent all the grudges he had held against her over the years.However, he quickly restrained himself: why should he be so serious?Why do you need to tell her what's on your mind?The key is to stick to the established strategy, let her relax her guard, restore her calm, and never let go of her surveillance for a moment.

Bettina recalled that during their conversation, Goethe, under various pretexts, left the room at least six times to sneak out to drink, which she detected in his exhalation.She finally couldn't help laughing, and asked him why he drank secretly, and he was furious. I find Bettina's behavior more interesting than Goethe's stealing: she behaves differently than you and I, and we may just look at Goethe with interest and say nothing, discreetly and politely.But she said those things that others would never dare to say, ("I smell alcohol on you! Why are you drinking? Why are you drinking secretly?") This is her not letting him be too intimate, but also being able to get closer to him way.Bettina always pretended to be innocent.Such indecent remarks, which seemed to be taken for granted, suddenly reminded Goethe of Bettina whom he had decided thirteen years earlier to never see again.He stood up without a word, held up a lamp, and said that he would see the end, and that he would accompany the visitor through the dark hallway to the door.

Bettina went on to say in her letter that in order not to let him go, she knelt at the door and said: "I want to see if I can stop you, and see if you are a good elf, or like Faust's mouse , is a bad elf; this threshold is passed every day by the greatest elf, my greatest friend, and I will kiss this threshold and bless it." How is Goethe doing?Again I had to quote Bettina verbatim.He is said to have said: "I will never trample you, nor your love, to pass; your love is my great consolation; I shall pass sideways, considering the elves you speak of (he was careful, indeed. Going around her kneeling body), too cunning, better get along with you!"

I think that Bettina's words from Goethe's mouth summed up what he had been silently conveying to her during this interview, which was: I know, Bettina, you draw the monument sketch What a clever plan.In my twilight years, of course, I was thrilled to see my hair blowing like flames, (God, my poor thinning hair!) But I soon realized that what you showed me was not a sketch, but your hand A pistol was aiming at Immortal behind me from a distance.I don't know how to disarm you.Therefore I do not want war.I want peace.That's all.I will walk around you carefully, I will not touch you, I will not hug you or kiss you.First, I have no such desire, and second, I know that everything I do will turn into a bullet in your pistol.

10 Bettina returned to Weimar two years later and saw Goethe (he was seventy-five at the time) almost every day, and at the end of her stay she made another brazen act of obsequiousness in order to gain access to Karl O'Connor. Gust's palace.This time, something unexpected happened: Goethe lost his temper. "That nasty gadfly," diesel leidige Bremse, he wrote to the Archduke, "flew from my mother to me, and has troubled me for years. She was a clown in her youth, and twittered like an oriole, Now she is repeating the old tricks. If Your Highness agrees, I will be like a strict old uncle and teach her not to behave again; otherwise, her flattery will continue to harass Your Highness."

Six years later, she came to Weimar again, but Goethe refused to see her.Comparing her to a nasty gadfly completes his tale. strangeness.When he received the sketch of the monument, he had planned to live in peace with her.Even though he was terrified to see her, he still wanted to do everything he could (not even to sniff the alcohol) to spend an evening "friendly" with her.And why would he let those efforts go to waste now?He has always been careful not to die in disheveled clothes and run towards immortality, but why did he suddenly write that sentence about the annoying gadfly?For this reason, even after Faust or The Sorrows of Young Werther have been forgotten, people will continue to scold him for a hundred or three hundred years.

Life is always this moment.At that time, it cannot be generalized. Until that particular moment comes, death is so remote from us that we don't take it seriously.It disappeared without a trace and was nowhere to be found.This is the first and happiest period of life. However, when we suddenly find that death is right in front of us, we can no longer think about it, it is always with us.Because immortality is inseparable from death, as the literary laurels are to Hardy, we might as well say that immortality is inseparable from us.Once we become aware that it is with us, we eagerly seek it.For it, we wear custom-made costumes and buy a new tie, fearing that someone else will pick out the tie for us, which is not to our liking.So Goethe decided to write his memoirs, the famous "Poetry and Truth", and he decided to ask his subordinate Eckermann (strange coincidence of dates: the same year, 1823, Bettina sketches for a monument to him) wrote "Goethe Conversations", which paints a beautiful image formed under the benevolent control of the person depicted.

This second stage of life, in which one has to keep one's eyes on death, is followed by the next stage, a stage of shortest duration and yet most mysterious, about which very little is known and which is talked about. Also very few.Physical strength is declining day by day, and people always feel a kind of fatigue.Fatigue is the silent bridge from this shore of life to the other shore of death.At this stage, death is so close that it is disturbing to watch.But it can still be said to be invisible, nowhere to be found, because that is what is too close, too familiar.An exhausted man looks out of the window and sees only the tops of the trees whose names he murmurs silently: chestnut, poplar, maple; names as good as life itself.The poplar is tall and straight, like an athlete stretching his arms to the sky; or like a flame that freezes after flying into the air.Poplar, same - poplar.If you compare immortality with the poplar tree outside the window that this old man saw, then the so-called immortality is just a ridiculous phantom, empty talk, and a ride in a net that catches butterflies.Dying old men have no interest in immortality. So, what will this exhausted old man, who is looking at a poplar tree through the window, suddenly appear, sit on the table, kneel on the threshold, and talk loudly?With an indescribable excitement, a sudden rush of life, he would call her a loathsome gadfly. I think of the moment when Goethe wrote the words "the nasty gadfly".I imagined the thrill he was going through, and I thought he would suddenly realize that he had never done what he wanted to do in his life.He always thought that he was in control of immortality, but this sense of responsibility firmly held him back, making him follow the rules and dare not go one step further.He is afraid of the absurd, but he yearns for it, and as soon as he does something absurd, he tries to smooth it out, to place it in the realm of fairness, which he usually regards as beauty. The words "obnoxious Gadfly" are inseparable from his works, his life, and even his immortality.They are an absolute freedom.They could only have been written by a man in the third stage of life, when immortality is no longer at the beck and call of man.Not everyone can reach this highest state, but whoever has reached that state knows that only there can one find true freedom. These thoughts passed through Goethe's mind, but he soon forgot them because he was very old and his memory was very poor. ① Eckermann (1792-1854), a German writer, is famous for writing "Goethe Talks on Live Records". 11 We remember, the first time she went to see him, she acted like a child.Twenty-five years later, in March 1832, she heard that Goethe was seriously ill and immediately sent her child to him: her eighteen-year-old son Sigmund.Following his mother's instructions, the shy boy spent six days in Weimar without knowing anything about it.But Goethe knew: she had sent her ambassador, and his presence told him that death was imminently at the door, and that Bettina would take charge of his immortality in her own hands. Death did come in at the door.Goethe struggled for a week and was dying on March 22.A few days later, Bettina wrote to Goethe's executor, Justice von Müller: "Goethe's death has left an indelible impression on me, but not a sad one. I cannot express it exactly in words, but I I feel that is perhaps the closest way to say it is an impression of honor." We should take a closer look at Bettina's interpretation: not sorrow, but glory. Shortly thereafter, she demanded that Justice von Müller return all her letters to Goethe, and reread them to her great disappointment: the whole story of her relationship with Goethe remained only a sketch, which might be the epitome of a masterpiece. The outline, but after all, it is only an outline, and it is a very imperfect outline.Therefore, she has to process.She revises, rewrites, and adds to it for three years.She was dissatisfied with her letter and even more disappointed with Goethe's reply.After rereading it this time, she found that they were so short and reserved, and many places were even out of context, which annoyed her.Sometimes he seemed to ignore her childish mask completely in his letters to her, as if he were giving a lesson to a schoolgirl in a half-serious, half-doting tone.She therefore felt compelled to vary their tone: where he called her "our dear friend," she added "my dear darling," and after his severe reprimand, she added a few words of flattery. Or tout it, claiming that Bettina had had such a great influence on the bewitched poet that she was his muse. Of course, she was even more presumptuous when she rewrote her own letters.She didn't change the tone of it, though, and it was just right.What she changed were the dates of the letters (so that the intervals between their correspondence were not too long, which might negate the stability of their intimacy), and she cut out many inappropriate passages (for example, begging Goethe not to publish her passages showing letters), added passages, dramatized certain scenes, and expanded and deepened her views on politics, art, especially music and Beethoven. She wrote the book in 1835 and published it as Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem kinde, Correspondence between Goethe and a Child.At first, no one questioned the authenticity of these correspondences, but in 1920 the original letters were discovered and made public. God!Why didn't she burn them in time? Put yourself in her shoes: Burning those cherished documents is just too difficult to do; it's tantamount to admitting to yourself that you're going to die soon, that you might die tomorrow; and so you put off that destruction day after day , but one day, it was too late. Man usually thinks about immortality, but forgets to think about death. 12 Perhaps because our century is drawing to a close, we have gained a certain perspective, and it is reasonable to think of Goethe as a figure at the center of European history.Goethe - the center of greatness.This is not a specious center that avoids extremes, but a real center that balances two extremes delicately, but Europe will never be like this again.Goethe studied alchemy in his youth, but later became one of the first modern scientists.He is the greatest German, and yet he is an anti-patriotic European.Goethe was a citizen of the world, but he never left his province, that little Weimar, almost all his life.His life belongs to nature, but at the same time it belongs to history.In love, he is both a romantic and a bohemian.also: Let us think back to Agnes in the elevator with chorea.Although she was an expert in computer cybernetics, she had no idea what was going on in the machine's mind.For her, this elevator is so strange and unreasonable, it is exactly the same as all kinds of machinery she comes into contact with every day-from the small counter next to the telephone to the dishwasher. Relatively speaking, the historical era in which Goethe lived was different. The level of technology at that time had begun to provide people with comfort. However, for an educated person, his principles for the various utensils he used were Basically knowledgeable.Goethe knew what material his house was made of, he knew why his oil lamp could shine, and he also knew the principle of the telescope he and Bettina used to look at Jupiter; Being present at the surgery scene, he was able to use technical terms to talk to the doctor when he was sick.The entire technological world was open to him and understood by him.This is the great era in the center of European history where Goethe lived; today, if anyone is trapped in a trembling elevator, when he thinks of that great era, he must feel a kind of regret that he was born at an untimely time. Beethoven's work begins where Goethe's central position ends.At this moment, the world begins to lose its transparency, begins to darken, becomes more and more incomprehensible, it rushes towards the unknown; man, abandoned by the world, retreats into his own self, indulges in nostalgia, dreams, rebellion , Let your own inner voice drown out and not hear any external voices.But that inner voice seemed to Goethe an intolerable noise.Goethe's aversion to noise was well known, and he could not even stand the barking of dogs in the distant garden.It was said that he didn't like music, that's not true, it was orchestras that he didn't like.He likes Bach because Bach still sees music as a transparent combination of individual sounds, each of which is still clearly identifiable.But in Beethoven's symphonies, the sounds of the various instruments merge into harmonies of noise and lament.Goethe could no more bear the roar of the orchestra than the loud sighs of the soul.Bettina's friends who belonged to the younger generation saw the otherworldly Goethe plug his ears and cast disgusted eyes at them.For this they cannot forgive him, they accuse him of being the enemy of the soul, of rebellion and of affection. Bettina was the sister of the poet Briantano, wife of the poet Arnim, and she respected Beethoven.She belonged to the Romantic generation, but she was also a friend of Goethe.No one else had the status: she was like a queen who ruled two kingdoms. Her book is full of praise for Goethe.All her letters are an ode to him.Yes, just because everyone knows that Frau Goethe knocked off her spectacles, and that Goethe dishonorably betrayed that lovely child to accommodate that crazy sausage, this book is also (to a large extent) A lesson in love for the late poet, who behaved so vulgarly and contemptuously on major emotional issues, sacrificing passion to keep a poor and dull marriage.Bettina's book is both a tribute and a whip.