He had come to Rome and not found...

"Goethe admitted that he could not 'say in what specifically the new light consists', and he never tells us what the disease was from which he had been cured, but we may take it that it was something like the hope of fulfilment in which he had been traveling since September [1786], the yearning that had gnawed at his heart since his youth. But the yearning had been cured not through being satisfied, but through his recognizing, and refusing any longer to tolerate, the unreality of its object. He had come to Rome and not found what he was looking for, and that, he thought, was his great discovery. He had set out on a 'symbolical' journey, and at its end had discovered the limits on the world's willingness to be filled with his own personal meaning. He had come looking for culmination, enjoyment, and a revelatory immediacy of experience, and he had found, or thought he had found, the need for study, informed understanding, and hard work."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 441.

"By thinking you get old."

"Why do you think so much? A man should never think. By thinking you get old." [Count Cesarei to Goethe, ~October 22, 1786, in the carriage nearing Florence.]

-- Cited in Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 430.

the story of Genesis

"Over the generations, the ways that people have understood Genesis tend to correlate with the ways that people have understood reality. It is not just that Genesis provides an account of the origins of reality -- which it does -- but that the kinds of meaning that people expect to find in Genesis are the same kind that they expect in the world outside of the book. In other words, the ways that people perceive Genesis both shape and reflect their perception of reality. What is perhaps surprising is how radically these ways of perceiving Genesis and reality have changed over time,..."

-- The Book of Genesis: A Biography, Ronald Hendel, 2013, p. 8.

bemasked in 1780s Weimar

"The isolation of a self cut off from a society into which it sends only masks, or 'figure', is a recurrent refrain in Goethe's letters in the early Weimar period, which only intensifies after his move to the apparently more social world of the house on Frauenplan."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 351.

"...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

"Is the mortal, transient artist the servant of an independent world-order which stretches before and after him, to whose laws he acknowledges himself subject and parts of which are imitated in his works? If so, a realistic, objective, living art is possible, of the kind we associate with Homer or Shakespeare (or perhaps, outside Germany, with the nineteenth-century novel). But if not, if the artist remains an autonomous creator, acknowledging no ordering force except that which he finds within him, can his work ever escape from its dependence upon him? Must it not remain...frozen icons of the artist's self?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 165-166.

Goethe or Christ, ca. 1771

"What was the origin of this sudden access of meaning-creating power? It is surely not difficult to see it in Goethe's simultaneous and conscious detachment from religious belief. Released from the pursuit by the Saviour, and so from any specific obligation to 'imitate' Christ, or to appropriate either the great symbolic acts of His Life, or the symbolic rites which the Church derives from them to articulate all lives, the self-moving monadic soul is free to define its own sacred times and places and actions, to mark the stages of its endless desire, or 'appetition'. The mechanism for the construction of meaning remains that of Christianity -- a life with symbolic episodes, a literature referring to that life both in prophecy and in retrospective interpretation -- but it becomes available for the soul to use only if Christ is displaced from His privileged position: the soul has a meaningful life of its own only in so far as it is not a follower of Christ -- it is necessarily antagonistic to His rival claims. The rejection, however, of so powerful and established a model creates what might be called a problem of objectivity. The significant events of Christ's life are grounded in secular history and are the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, while the preaching and sacraments which the Church has based upon them have an application proved in myriads of lives. What confidence can Goethe have that the meaning he finds in his non-Christian life and literature and reputation is similarly well-founded? What guarantees that his permanently renewed efforts at self-understanding do issue in truth, that he is not just telling endlessly adaptable and multipliable stories about himself, not just painting the walls of his Sentimentalist prison?"

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 109-110.

the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application

"There are in particular two major features of Germany's developing literature in the period of Goethe' youth -- say,  until 1770 -- which are interesting precisely because of the extent to which, for all their importance (usually ignored by the official accounts), they do not determine the original direction of Goethe's unique talent. The first is the earliest example of the transfer of religious terminology to a secular application: the growth of German aesthetic theory (the ex-theology of an ex-clerisy), the establishment of the concepts 'literature', 'art' in general, 'artistic genius', and, the religious term in which thirty years of philosophizing are eventually focused, 'artistic creativity'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire, Nicholas Boyle, 1991, p. 26.

valuable real estate: hell

"In response to those who believed that virtue was its own reward, it was commonly argued that this was insufficient motive for the moral life; morality needed to be supported by fear of divine justice. Some preachers feared that sin was so attractive, and the possibility of avoiding the evil consequence here on earth so great, that without the curb of retribution vice would predominate even more than it did. In fact, the belief in the value of hell as a deterrent for immoral behavior was one of the major reasons why the doctrine of hell was so rarely attacked in the seventeenth century."

-- Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics -- A Study in Enthusiasm, Stanley Grean, 1967, p. 188.

Whence??, Whither??, Why??

"...the metaphysical thrill was a genuine and frequent experience of unbelievers in Germany long before the Romantics. As to the philosophers, Heine was not far wrong when he wrote in Die Romantische Schule that German philosophy, though it now claimed a place by the side of the Protestant Church, or even above it, was nevertheless only its daughter, and literary men too, sometimes unconsciously, were concerned to answer just those questions about life which their childhood religion had made all important for them, but which today, for many English philosophers at least, seem to be literally without meaning, so much do our intellectual interests depend on the intellectual climate we are in."

-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 28.

Paris, June 1843

Paris, 19 June 1843
[Jacob Burckhardt to Willibald Beyschlag]

"As for Paris, it is far from making the historic impression which one expects of it. In spite of the foolish love which French art and Paris society show for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, everyone is anxiously on the look-out for what is most modern, and a hundred life-size advertisements cry down every memory of the past at all the classical spots in the town. One only gets a mythical notion of the first Revolution; on the whole, Paris is far more absorbed in an anxious care for the future than in recollections of its past, although the individual memorials are legion. I do not think it can be very long before there is another explosion. In the meantime everyone is living from day to day, that is the predominating impression."

-- The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, ed. Alexander Dru, 1955, p. 81-82.