At least every day

„Der Mensch ist so geneigt, sich mir dem Gemeinsten abzugeben, Geist und Sinne stumpfen sich so leicht gegen die Eindrücke des Schönen und Vollkommenen ab, daß man die Fähigkeit, es zu empfinden, bei sich auf alle Weise erhalten sollte.  Denn einen solchen Genuß kann niemand ganz entbehren, und nur die Ungewohntheit, etwas Gutes zu genießen, ist Ursache, daß viele Menschen schon am Albernen und Abgeschmackten, wenn es nur neu ist, Vergnügen finden. Man sollte”, sagte er, „alle Tage wenigstens ein kleines Lied hören, ein gutes Gedicht lesen, ein treffliches Gemälde sehen und, wenn es möglich zu machen wäre, einige vernünftige Worte sprechen.” 

- Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Fünftes Buch, Erstes Kapitel

“Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. For no man can bear to be entirely deprived of such enjoyments: it is only because they are not used to taste of what is excellent, that the generality of people take delight in silly and insipid things, provided they be new. For this reason,” he would add, “one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it be possible to do, to speak a few reasonable words.” 

- Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Book V, Chapter 

I recently heard the “at least every day” excerpt of this passage in the film Ballon delivered by an East German headmaster to the assembled school at an end-of-year concert.

Only nature

"This confirmed me in my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin classic, p.32)

Turner wanting future generations to know nature through his work.

Pollock's somewhat defiant declaration: "I am nature" (made in response to a query if he worked from nature). In the context of Dante's statement that art is the child of nature, and thus the grandchild of God, Pollock seems blasphemous. In the context of the Origin of Species, he seems merely accurate.

Biscuits and cake and the rod

"Daß die Kinder nicht wissen, warum sie wollen, darin sind alle hochgelahrten Schul--und Hofmeister einig; daß aber auch Erwachsene gleich Kindern auf diesem Erdboden herumtaumeln und wie jene nicht wissen, woher sie kommen und wohin sie gehen, ebensowenig nach wahren Zwecken handeln, ebenso durch Biskuit und Kuchen und Birkenreiser regiert werden: das will niemand gern glauben, und mich dünkt, man kann es mit Händen greifen."

"All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want, but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (p.31, Penguin classic).

There is an interesting language difference between the sturdy Old English monosyllable "rod" (from the Old Norse "rudda" meaning "club") and the Germanic "Birkenreiser" ... "birch twigs".

Giuseppe Mazzotta - in his Yale lectures on Dante - explains that Dante perceives the problem of living to be a problem of the will, rather than the more simplistic classical view that it is a problem of knowledge. It is not enough to know the definition of justice, say; one must have the will to be just. We often know what is good for us, but choose something other. And that is perhaps the idea of sin: sin as error, a missing of the mark, a falling short, a failure of the will.

Don't look back

"The pains people endure would be less if only ... they did not put so much imaginitive energy into recalling the memory of past misfortune, rather than bear an indifferent present with equanimity." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther' (p.25, Penguin classic).

This is Buddhism.

The medieval idea of hope - at least as portrayed in Giuseppe Mazzotta's Yale lectures on Dante - as a belief that the future can redeem the past, is based on the idea that we do look back.

Which tribe was it that pictured us moving through time walking backward, because we look at the past and cannot see the future?

Which poet uses this?

Leonard Cohen talks about being blessed with a bad memory of his life.

Ingmar Bergman - in that late documentary Bergman Island - talks of a guilty conscious being an affectation.

Misunderstandings and lethargy

"Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps lead to more complications in the affairs of the world than trickery and wickedness" - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (p.26 Penguin classic).

This pithy observation could well apply to the mess and confusion within large corporations today.