Nature: A Fragment

I am sure I have mentioned over the years that Goethe pops up in the most surprising places. Just the other evening, transiting with a friend the many corridors linking the various city subway lines, we encountered on the walls of the corridor a recognition of Goethe's wisdom: The unnatural -- that too is natural. Goethe, 1749-1832.

Goethe is not the only author who is memorialized along this long corridor. Among others are James Joyce, Ovid, and Mother Goose.

Joyce: “Beside the rivering waters of ...”

  

Ovid: “Dripping water hollows out a stone”

 

Mother Goose: “Jack and Jill came down the hill ...”

 

But back to Goethe: My friend stood puzzled over what the quote from Goethe meant and asked if I couldn't look it up. I said that Goethe said so many things that have been quoted over the past two and a half centuries that it would probably be difficult to find. But my friend did find a reference, from an essay entitled "Nature: A Fragment," originally published in 1783 in Tiefurter Journal. It can also be found in a translation by Alan N. Shapiro.

“Nature! We are surrounded by and entangled in it, incapable of escaping from it, and incapable of penetrating deeper inside it. Without being asked and without warning, it draws us into the vortex of its dance and sweeps us away, until we are exhausted and drop from its arms. It creates eternally new forms; that which exists never was before; that which was never comes again –– everything is new, and yet forever old. We live in its midst, yet are strangers to it. It speaks with us ceaselessly, yet does not betray to us its secret. We act on it continuously, yet have no sway over it. It seems to have staked everything on individuality, yet does not know what to do with individuals. It always builds and always destroys, its forge is inaccessible. It lives through its children; but where is the mother? It is the only real artist: out of the simplest material, the greatest contrasts; without a hint of effort, the greatest perfection; the most precise determination, yet always topped with something soft. Each of its works has its own essence, each of its appearances the most singular characterization, yet it makes out of everything a unity.”

Goethe continues with observations that would seem to presage what is happening in the present. After all, consider how many things we consider in our lives to be natural when we execute them, from traveling by train or airplane as well as everyday behavior: punching a time clock. Daily life in an excessively material world forces us to accept its requisites. Thus, Goethe: “Even the most unnatural thing is Nature… He who does not see it everywhere does not see it correctly anywhere… We obey its laws even when we go against them; we work with it even when we want to work against it.”

(On the internet can be found more articles and essays on Goethe's work. Among the writers are Michael Schmidt, Henry F. Fullenwider, and a fascinating piece from 2015 in TLS Books by Tim Carpenter.)

In drafting this blog, I discovered that I had already posted on the subject of Goethe's essay back in 2022, in the post Goethe and Turgenev. I quoted Goethe biographer A.N. Wilson who wrote that Goethe’s essay “made a lasting impression on Turgenev.” Further, Turgenev assimilated Goethe and Schelling's notion that “nature is unitary, monistic, and inclusive of humanity.”

At this point, I should, retract a statement I wrote in the Turgenev/Goethe blog post, namely, that Goethe did not actually write the essay in question, although it was attributed to him. Recent work, including that of Alan Shapiro and Wilson attribute “Die Natur” to Goethe. 

 

BTW, besides the bust of Goethe in Bryant Park, there are fuller-scale statues of Gertrude Stein and William Cullen Bryant. Goethe's is oddly located, however, only a few yards away from the park's Merry Go Round, which he faces all day.