Eckermann pastiche

It is typical: when I do research on a given Goethe subject, I also come across something else of interest, and often far removed from actual Goethe scholarship. Case in question, a "story" in The New Yorker magazine, back on October 20, 1980, by Donald Barthelme. Taking up one full page of the magazine, the content mirrors the entries in Eckermann's Conversations, with all the pedantry and adulation that Eckermann brings to the job, while lathering it with Barthelme's irreverence. It begins with the date of an actual Eckermann's entry, November 13, 1823. Eckermann had recounted meeting a valet of Goethe's, who related an anecdote about Goethe, lying abed at night, having a premonition of an earthquake in the year 1783. No one at court believed him. "Höre! Goethe schwärmt!" said one of the court ladies. A few weeks later, however, they all learned that an earthquake had occurred in Messina on that date. Here is Barthelme's entry for the same date:

I was walking home from the theater with Goethe this evening when we saw a small boy in a plum-colored waistcoat. Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility.

Barthelme, who died in 1989 and did not have the wealth of Goethe "quotes" to be found on the internet today (see above picture), was obviously working avant la lettre in this genre of wisdom attribution to Goethe. Here is another good one from The New Yorker piece:

Art, Goethe said, is the 4 percent interest on the municipal bond of life.