"Things Go Better with Goethe"

The title of this post is a New York Times headline over a feature by Martin Walser that apeared in the Sunday Book Review in the year 1986. (The translator is noted as Leigh Hafrey.) That was a year when the New York Times actually deserved its reputation. Among other things, it featured pieces by writers who really knew what they were talking about, in contrast to the presently favored blowhards, who merely opinionate. The piece by Walser is also quite long, long pieces having been abandoned by the NYT in favor of large print and large photos, even on the front page.

I digress.

Walser begins by noting the appropriation of Goethe's words for commerce, prophecy, self-help, and general all-around good feeling. The first example he cites bearing Goethe's words occurs in the advertising copy for a medical journal that appeared in FAZ: ''Goethe'': ''Beginnings are always hard; they often don't lie ready to hand . . . and what everybody wants will emerge only slowly.''

Walser goes on to give examples of other Goethe wisdom in various national and personal contexts, but his aim is to point out the way Goethe has come to seem a model of how to live. As Walser writes: "Everyone who quotes Goethe becomes a little bit like Goethe. If I doubt I can make this assertion on my authority alone, I draw support from Goethe: 'The virtues we appreciate are rooted in us as well.'"

The heart of Walser's piece is quite serious and takes us through Goethe's life stages via his literary production, especially Wilhelm Meister. I quote herewith a small portion:

At Weimar, Goethe housed himself in a snail's shell grand enough to be the cosmos. If, as was the case with Socrates, not a line of his had survived, nothing but the letters and diaries of his contemporaries to tell us how he lived and what he said on this or that occasion, we would still have a sense of him.

Goethe only took his autobiography up to the day in 1775 when he received the invitation to go to Weimar. With that, for him, the most important questions had been answered. He probably would have been less of a model for the German people if he had gone to Italy then, as his father and he himself wanted. He was actually on the way; one can imagine he would have become just another artist burning himself out on the Roman Corso in one disguise after another, as contemptuous of the world as he was narcissistic. He would in any case have encountered few real obstacles. His Wilhelm Meister novel would have remained an art novel - Wilhelm would have lived out his coming of age under interestingly rarefied circumstances.

But Goethe, though he was already considered a genius for ''Gotz'' and ''Werther,'' chose - no doubt in response to his deepest instincts - the more difficult environment. He faced real obstacles and engaged in self-fulfillment not for its own sake, but in confrontation with a kind of duty - an almost Schillerian abstraction for Goethe's sense of the absolutely real. That is how I see him - he was always drawn to what was most alive. Not to a life running free, but a life still suppressed, still disoriented, one that demands more than it has, has a right to more than it is given - that is, a life as yet unsure of its claim to legitimacy. In that situation, one has to help oneself without knowing how. Life is at its most lively when it still lacks something.

Having posted several times on the practice of quoting Goethe in various contexts, I now regularly run quotes through Google Translate. The one in the image at the top of this post strikes me as inauthentic:

Sie müssen nicht um die Welt reisen, um zu verstehen, dass der Himmel überall blau ist.

It doesn't have enough gravity to come from Goethe. What do you think?