they choke the life out of us. They not only rob and steal—they murder our souls with shame.
Auerbach’s wine cellar—a little glimpse of hell, all goodness turned on its head, and a foreshadowing (more immediately) of the very next scene, “The Witch’s Kitchen.” The men in the tavern, full of passion and lacking all wisdom (unlike Faust, who possesses both), resemble the monkeys who serve the witch, warming their paws in their mistress’s absence. Faust’s aversion to the witch—he prefers the devil to old women37 and their folk remedies. But the devil does not do his own dirty work. A youth potion takes time and patience to distill, Mephisto insists, and so Faust must deal with the pharmacologically gifted old woman whether he likes it or not. How interesting that the young woman in the mirror (Margarete) appears to Faust seductively stretched out. He is seeing her in the mirror of his destiny not as who she is, as yet an undefiled maiden, but rather as what she will become in response to him.38
June 30
I think my master’s ironical demeanor—a few remarks today about Mrs. H.’s housekeeping regimen seemed to poke fun—is intended to avoid falsehood, but also tends toward falsehood. Everyone plays the straight man to Mephistopheles, Goethe’s master ironist. The witch’s magic spells are no more nonsensical than the theological doctrine of the Trinity, according to Mephisto. And while, of course, Mephisto himself does not actually believe this (the ironist is never persuaded), he sets us to guessing. I would say he makes us think (rather than swallow mystifying contradictions whole), but that is not what he is after. As the witch chants:
The high power
Of knowledge,
Hidden from the whole world!
And the man who does not think,
To him it is given:
He has it effortlessly.
To the academically trained Faust this is all nonsense, and yet there is sense in it. It goes back to something the Lord says—not entirely clear which person of the Trinity this is supposed to represent, since Jesus was also there from the beginning—in the play’s “Prologue in Heaven”: “A person strays so long as he strives.”
God and Satan are so often on the same page, so to speak, while noble humanity (Faust) fumbles to find its place. The perspective of the ironist—rising above. The perspective of the contemplative—resting within. Those poor desert mystics, how did they keep from going to the devil?
Matt 18:15–20. Dare I tell my master that I think he errs in perching himself on his ironic height, that he cannot be happy there, that happiness matters, that God wants us to be happy? What do I know about God or happiness? But I feel he is mistaken. And to avoid the Christian community (“where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst”) on account of their subjection to benighted leaders is pure arrogance. It is so much easier to say we must confront one another in private first, than it is to do it. And yet if we can venture it, he is there to help, whereas he flees from all backbiting. How pious and preachy I have become. I must be truly unhappy. I think it best not to wait until my master makes another ironical remark to let him know how I feel about it, as that would seem like a small act of revenge. Daniel, the lions, the Christians—who more fierce? Who more afraid?
July 1
No sign of him today—working, sleeping, taking meals in his rooms or out. So elusive. Faust about to meet Margarete in the flesh for the first time. He will be her undoing. Knowing this already on a second reading—not learning through suffering (it is too late for that) but a heightened suffering through knowledge, seeing things for what they are. My new objectivity.
Matt 18:21–35. “Should you not have shown mercy to your fellow servant as I showed mercy to you?” The arithmetic of sin. Revenge-cycles expand eleven-fold through six generations. Cain avenged seven times, Lamech seventy-seven times.39 Mercy-cycles, to root out revenge, must expand 490-fold within one generation. Where does Peter get seven from? He must be thinking of the Sabbath and Jubilee cycles. People and the land are allowed to rest every seven days and seven years, and debts are forgiven and indentured servants released from their servitude every forty-nine years—seven times seven.40 To forgive “from the heart” is to cease keeping track. What long memories we have for sin, though I could not tell you what Mrs. H. and I served our master for dinner last week.
Faust is a very Christian play at heart, I think, for the only hint of revenge is in Mephisto’s sport with the vicious, and this is only momentary, and is only giving them not what they deserved, but rather what they desired, in the form of a literalized metaphor, e.g., “firewater” for the men in the tavern. Be careful what you wish for, Mephisto playfully warns again and again. He could just as well be a Brahmin or a Buddha, preaching on the ravages of passion. Real love, not the morose morality play of sermonizing sinners, is what Goethe will extract from Faust. But first he must become a full-fledged sinner. Faust must know a deeper regret than what he felt for his patients who suffered and died under his benighted medieval medical practice. But I get ahead of my reading.
July 2
A dream last night. I had my little girl—born alive—and she was five years old. We were walking hand-in-hand down the street—it seemed like Berlin, but with everyone speaking Danish and all the signs in yet another language. But my little girl and I spoke German. Her name was Mai, for the month in which she was born, and it was spring again and the city was fresh and very pretty. Mai popped the question, “Where is my daddy?” just like that, entirely out of the blue, and I said “in heaven,” without thinking. I did not mean to suggest that he was dead (he may or may not be, for all I know), but to indicate that her only hope for paternal protection would come from above. We walked on. In the dream I had no misgivings and thought I had been clear. When I awoke I remembered all my losses.
Matt 19:1–12. “Some are neutered because they were born that way, and some are neutered because people neutered them, and some are neutered because they neutered themselves for the sake of heaven.” Jesus tells his disciples that whatever he or Moses has said about marriage or divorce at any given time is meant strictly for the understanding and situation of those to whom each was speaking. But in this short disquisition, it seems to me, he has covered all the possibilities. He has provided an anatomy of marital dispositions. The natural state, he argues on the authority of Genesis, is for a man to be united with a woman for life. Moses allowed divorce, he claims, on account of the hard-heartedness (we would say heartlessness) of the ancient Israelite men toward their women. (They were polygamous, like the Arabs today, I gather, though this is no proof of insensibility.) But the most interesting cases are represented by Jesus himself, who I do believe was celibate for the sake of his ministry (who in his right mind would marry and have children knowing his fate would be that of Jesus?); Paul, who I think was not suited to marriage from birth, being of the most extreme temperament; and people such as myself, and perhaps my master, ruined for marriage by what others have made of them. Certainly combinations of these categories are also possible. Luther began with Jesus and ended with Adam. It is a wonder the monastery did not ruin him for marriage.
Faust meets Margarete “in passing” and, in response to his gentlemanly courtesy, she drily responds that she is neither pretty nor a young lady,41 by which she does not mean to suggest she is no longer a virgin, but rather that she is not overly given to undue courtesy. She proves her point by being so curt with Faust, who is not the least bit deterred—on the contrary, he is charmed by her rudeness. Or rather her rusticity.
July
