Fragments of Lichtenberg

By Pierre Senges

The eighteenth-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg left behind at the time of his death thousands of fragmentary notes commenting on a dazzling and at the same time puzzling array of subjects. Pierre Senges’s Fragments of Lichtenberg imaginatively and hilariously reconstructs the efforts of scholars across three centuries to piece together Lichtenberg’s disparate notes into a coherent philosophical or artistic statement. What emerges instead from their efforts are a wide variety of conflicting and competing Lichtenbergs – the poet, the physicist, the philosopher, the humorist – and a very funny meditation on the way interpretations and speculation create new histories and new realities.

In just over half a century, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) had the time to be all of the following: a hunchback; a mathematician; a physics professor; a connoisseur of hare pate; a hermit; an electrical theorist; a skirtchaser; a friend of King George III of England; an asthmatic; a defender of reason; a hypochondriac; a dying man; and the author of 8,000 fragments written with ink and goose quills. Traditionally those fragments have been considered no more than aphorisms, to be sipped like fine schnapps, but certain scholars claim, however, that his famous Wastebooks are really the scattered pieces of a Great Novel, and that this might yet be reconstructed, with the help of scissors, glue, and paper, and by using what is left of our imaginations. The present volume retracts, among other things, the work undertaken for more than a century by valiant Lichtenbergians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Release date: Jan 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781628972108

Pierre Senges

Pierre Senges, born in 1968, is the author of fifteen works of fiction and essays and close to twenty radiophonic plays. He has won numerous literary prizes.

Book preview

OBSEQUIES

Under a bonnet, in the place of a wig: a never-ending nose, a minuscule mouth, you might call it the mouth of a fish, the color of a strawberry, and that chin: Goethe, lying in his bed, prepared to die. Which explains the never-ending nose, said to lengthen with age and even extend itself, fatally, two or three hours before the end. He is surrounded by gentlemen (several names are cited, all have good reason to be present), and the maids solemnly pass a wet cloth over his forehead, ready to hold up the lorgnette each time he demands it: a surgeon surrounded by his assistants, engaged in the rather complex task of operating on his own agony. Goethe is dying, his bed’s become imprinted with the shape of his body, and his eiderdown no longer warms him—he thinks of Socrates saying something about a cock, but he can’t remember why that wily peasant started talking about poultry at such a tragic hour, to his crying disciples, who would cry on for centuries, before falling asleep like some exhausted but happy old bear (on his back). They lean closer, the doctors bump their heads, which must make a sound like ideas clanking together, or pots; the flame in the oil lamp is turned up, ears are tilted toward him, no one wants to miss his last words (he asked earlier that a plate of macaroni be heated up for him; it would be a pity if it were left at that)—and indeed, Goethe fidgets, his lower lip separates from his upper, then his jaw moves, and someone claims to have seen an index finger (Goethe’s) point in the direction of the window (what does it mean? God? a blackbird?). They wanted satisfaction and they would accept no substitute: the master of Weimar bestowed his final words upon them, two syllables, and what syllables they were: Mehr (and then, a moment later) Licht—before passing away for good and turning dark gray in the space of a minute: who would have believed it?

Of all those doctors sitting around the bed (and skull) of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—astronomers, geologists, physicists, lexicographers, mineralogists—only one understood, or believed he’d understood, that the master had been a little too short of breath to finish his sojourn on earth, as he should have, in beauty: a little more air, enough for one or two more syllables (one only needed to look at Wolfgang Goethe’s slate-colored complexion, it was asphyxiation, something obviously went down the wrong pipe). Had he been able to finish what he was trying to say, instead of choking in the throes of death, Goethe would have added the syllables enberg to the first two he’d spoken: Mehr Lichtenberg—and then he would have collapsed, relieved at the completion of his duty at last, convinced of having bestowed his final testament on mankind.

Goethe on his deathbed: a little out of breath and fragile of health (he should have visited the baths in Switzerland), his last sigh passing silently, or held back, which is to say repressed, somewhere in those regions between the larynx and the pharynx that are so difficult to sort out. Goethe had never been a great sportsman (mineralogist, astronomer, bookkeeper, courtier, and even poet, physicist, and ophthalmologist, yes, but never a sportsman—the one time he used a walking stick, it was to pull down a copy of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals from the top of his bookcase): he lacked the force to expel the phoneme enberg, and it would remain his secret forever (whoever would like to possess this treasure must go to Weimar, exhume the master, and open up his stomach). A single witness is supposed to have seen the lips of the master (already a very exquisite blue) pressing together to pronounce the next consonant: his lips struggled but finally remained closed out of his desire to pronounce them correctly (and while Goethe’s lips floundered on the b of berg like an old man stumbles over a three-inch bump in the road, Goethe’s eyes began to shine with the special light of horror: terrorized, visibly terrorized, at the idea of leaving this world on a misunderstanding).

Too late, too late: Mehr Licht rang out, immediately becoming famous; it was already being repeated as Goethe’s soul fled into the air.

Mehr Licht: more light

Mehr Lichtenberg: more Lichtenberg

Proverb: If Goethe had had more breath, his last words would have been Mehr Lichtenberg.

OTHER OBSEQUIES

Several decades earlier (and here we find the voice of the narrator), it was Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s turn to close his lips for the last time and to offer his body up to the cares of the taxidermists: fifty pounds of absorbent cotton through the orifices. Around his bed, a much more modest funeral assembly, perhaps a priest, though possibly not, as they sometimes get impatient and leave before the epilogue; let’s say that there was no one, or just the cook and the shadows cast by the oak cabinets: a silent agony, accompanied only by the music of his illness, a gnawing, eroding, shaking, and peeling sound made not by a stringed instrument but from an instrument made of flesh and bones. A wordless death, not a thing to inspire a grammarian: books closed, poetry forgotten. And in the place of great intellectual prestige, instead of the pomp of the podium or the catafalque, instead of the ceremony of the last word—nothing but the misery of a body shriveling up, growing cold, and falling to pieces, finally freezing into the shape of a Z. Lichtenberg knew how to console himself, thinking this is how the wildebeests die, if there are such things as wildebeests. Nor did he trouble himself with having any last words, for the simple reason that he had done away with this formality with remarkable brio, five or six years earlier: in fifteen or so pages, the List of Seventy-Two Last Words to Be Sublimely Pronounced on My Deathbed When I See My End Approach—it’s not impossible that Mehr Licht was one of the seventy-two.

Seventy-Two Last Words to Be Sublimely Pronounced On My Deathbed When I See My End Approach (Excerpts): It’s either her or me / What time is it, anyway? / I think I’m starting to enjoy this / Could I leave during the intermission? / What will you do without me? / I must admit, I have one or two really unforgettable things in my archives / Guess who I am imitating / My death is fifty-seven years late / Don’t take offense at so little/I’ll do my best /We haven’t been properly introduced / He who is prepared for everything is never disappointed / You’ll tell me how it ends? [etc.]

BIRTH OF GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

1742, the War of Austrian Succession. A young waif, twenty-three years of age, claims the right to the throne of Charles VI, her father, known as Charles VI of Austria, also known as the Holy Roman and German Emperor. Though in her twenties and having rosy round cheeks, Maria Theresa maintains that she is the queen of Bohemia and of Hungary, the archduchess of Austria, the mistress of her own house, and empress too. Certain meddlers think differently, and eight years of war are the result—France, Prussia, and Austria all together—and the wounded soldiers play taps for the dead soldiers. In 1742, Robert Walpole, the father of little Horace, goes into retirement after so many loyal, proud, and exhausting years of service to the Crown of England; the same year, in Dublin, George Friedrich Handel composes and then stages at the New Music Hall his Messiah, which will be his great success, one of many. Christian Goldbach conjectures that any number greater than five can be written as the sum of three prime numbers. Still in 1742, Maria Theresa of Austria, of Hungary, of Bohemia, etc., gives birth to Maria Christina, her fifth child: eleven more follow, then Maximilian Franz, the youngest, who will later become the bishop of Munster (and before him, Maria Antoinette, who’ll come to shake her curls one day in France); at or about the same time, Giacomo Casanova studies the sciences in Venice and law in Padua; William Hogarth completes The Graham Children; Johann Kaspar Lavater celebrates his first twelve months by growing teeth; Frederick II signs a peace treaty in Breslau on June 11th, and uses the opportunity to take back Silesia. On the 30th of the same month, at around nine in the evening, the womb of Henriette Katharina Eckhardt experiences its first contractions; a little after midnight, it’s announced that her water has broken; in the meantime, Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, her spouse, the pastor, has left to wake a doctor; part of the night is spent in the company of kettles and white linens; curiously, the cervix of the uterus refuses to open, a pomade of some sort is needed, but fortunately there’s always somebody around who can improvise a solution under duress; at around five in the morning, three square inches of pink flesh appear through the opening—a few minutes later, the screams of the mother have ceased and those of the baby begin: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg appears to have a particular interest in the vowels a or i—his parents rejoice: the child is born.

LICHTENBERG AS A CANDELABRUM

He has been compared, because of his hump, to a candelabrum. Yet you’d have to actually have seen a candelabrum, know what one looks like, frequent the rooms in which they tend to be placed, and be able to imagine a candelabrum with only one arm that is twisted from having been overheated. In any case, it would be a mistake: Lichtenberg looks more like a lamppost than a candelabrum.

DEATH OF LICHTENBERG, HIS PATRIMONY

It appears that a few hundred students (but only five of his colleagues in the professorate) followed Lichtenberg’s casket to the Bartholomäus cemetery. His patrimony? Not exactly the spoils of Ali Baba, once the chambermaids and the gravediggers had been paid: there was of course his library, but it was to join other libraries, sold off book by book, in batches, to places all over the world. A century later an attempt will be made to reconstitute the seven hundred to a thousand volumes bearing Georg Christoph’s coat of arms, but it will prove to be in vain: time will have passed and the books will have followed the vagaries of the market, treated more as waste paper than fine literature. And the market will be right, of course; better the incessant carousel of buying and selling to earn a profit, the true comfort of this world (because with profit comes heat, creating the steam that powers the locomotives), better all that than to remain swooning for hours in front of immense bookshelves: Ovid, Thousand and One Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, The Canterbury Tales, Marco Polo’s Travels and all the rest. Once his library has been sold (and so becomes one less thing to worry about), there remain a bit of honest money and a few articles of clothing, some pairs of pajamas, which Lichtenberg may have collected in order to vary the pleasures of his nights, or else to be presentable in case of insomnia. The pajamas—pants and shirts and sometimes a bonnet for the months of November through March—are sold to rag dealers, dependable types who are indifferent to the cult of relics, and who knot their acquisitions together in tight bundles, whites separated from blacks, cotton from linen and wool, to be resold for so many pennies on the half-pound to industrial papermakers, who will soak, press, and pulp them to produce a very flat, very beautiful paper, a kind no longer made today: the weave can be seen against the light, as well as the watermark, and it’s said that ink on such paper is like a fish in water.

What else? Trinkets: the various instruments favored by amateur mad scientists: no oscilloscopes (they hadn’t been invented yet), but copper coils, solenoids, the early stages of electric batteries—a layer of metal, a layer of acid—compasses, squares, a ruler made of bone that’s a testament to French genius, a plumb line, a die (not for gambling, but for calculating probabilities), a planisphere, a map of the heavens, and another of the moon. After all this, there’s only some furniture, more or less heavy, to be divided among the cousins and brothers. Finally, there’s that trunk filled with what look at first to be old boxes, but that, upon closer examination, turn out to be folded pages. According to the inventory of Master Strudel, public notary of Göttingen, there are approximately eight thousand pieces of paper, each covered with handwriting in black ink that has turned purple with age, sometimes only a single line, sometimes a paragraph, all attributable, with absolute certainty, to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. The family (imagine the day after the funeral: the we are but dust in the wind has been pronounced, earth has been thrown on Lichtenberg’s coffin, the withering carnations already providing the living with an example of healthy indifference to the fate of a cadaver), the family considers these eight thousand fragments—which have apparently nothing to do with the deceased’s last will and testament—and they wonder whether they might be able to stuff their pillows with them. In the end, however, nothing is decided, and the eight thousand fragments of prose are left in bulk just as they were found, in the hopes that one day a nephew, or a grand-nephew, an obsessive bibliophile, will come and publish them in their currently disordered state (and, indeed, this is exactly what happened).

For want of a better alternative, the inheritors and the first editors called these fragments aphorisms, as if Georg Christoph Lichtenberg had wanted to hand down to mankind a series of sentences to be painted by hand onto soup plates, serving dishes, and bowls of Meissen porcelain, or to be sown onto the lapels of vests as good luck charms. You could spend forty years looking for the word aphorism in Lichtenberg’s eight thousand fragments without finding it, except perhaps by error: apocatastasis, yes, (a rare and sonorous word, probably an onomatopoeia: the sound of a gold coin falling down stairs), and aphonia (one of the seventy-seven illnesses Lichtenberg would suffer from over the course of a half century), but not one single mention of an aphorism.

HISTORY OF THE LICHTENBERGIANS, I

Hermann Sax, 1890

Let’s suppose there’s a story (an epic, a saga, or a feuilleton, who knows?) of the reconstitution of the oeuvre of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, undertaken by four or five generations of scholars and lovers of the written word between 1899 and 1999. It would be filled with enthusiasts, collectors, booksellers, archivists of all kinds, bibliophiles, and even bibliophages; we would see pioneers, losers, casualties, freeloaders, cheaters, scholars, connoisseurs, and laymen; bookworms destined to become graphomaniacs, dandies with Shakespeare rings; the bohemian youth of Dublin, particularly frisky in the late morning hours, or the literary cliques of Paris, chic to the nth degree, wearing wing collars and stovepipe pants; we would see university professors, timid to various degrees, myopic in proportion to their timidity, and in these timid myopes we would catch the glimmers of genius; there would be kabbalists coming from the distant countryside, before disappearing into smoke, which they would mistake for foliage or divine grace; there would be emissaries, canvassers, frequenters of auction houses, lovers of puzzles, hundred-year-old (or even two-hundred-year-old) hommes de lettres; a kind of mute calligrapher who, before dying, becomes fascinated yet again by some bits of manuscript. There would surely be German philologists, tired of pushing their way through the halls of their Gymnasium only to run smack into the word hubris, tired of digging in Asia Minor to find the ruins of Troy under the ruins of Troy; we’d see the scholars of Paris (yes, yet again), neglecting their objects of study the better to cultivate controversies (because the function of the quarrel à la française is to distance yourself from your opponent while also trying to tear his hair out) and dramatize everything they touch, marching back to their schools in triumph bearing the gory fingernails and teeth of the doomed House of Atreus; we’d also cross paths with the relatively sedate intellectuals of Sweden, faithful (though this remains to be verified) to a certain reserve for which they are so well known, without alcohol and without excess, the exact opposite of the tropical passion of Cuba, of Havana in the age of the casinos; there’d be one or two enlightened patrons at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, during an age when families sitting on a pile of thalers or pounds sterling judged it good for the salvation of their souls and for the future of civilization to reserve a portion of their fortune to be given in installments to composers, painters, or odd dodecaphonists. There’d be loners and eccentrics, poor enough to live in seven-square-meter cells, sleeping, eating, reading, working, and chattering to themselves, never leaving their only stool—which, luckily for them, spins. Far away from where fashionable and paleskinned poets cause uproars by reading aloud their manifestos while wearing top hats (because they think it’s funny) and tapping on tambourines (because they think it’s Negroid), we’d find ingenious bricoleurs who, instead of passing their time launching literary reviews (you ain’t seen nothing yet!), fill their desk drawers, pile up their books in stacks, or construct complex systems that will need to be patiently untangled, one day, before they can be read. We’d come across aesthetes united together, respectfully and in silence, as if on their way to Mantua to take a close look at the fresco, two thirds destroyed, of a primitive man of great genius. There’d be clever people, just as there’d be champions and skeptics, men with cool heads (orange sherbet), and others with hard heads, and lazy readers too who love to lie in bed, having learned in their laziness not to rush their thoughts in directions they’re not ready to go. Under certain circumstances, there’d be clandestine literary circles gathered under rooftops and garrets, or in basements, close to the coal bins or the cold-storage rooms in butcher shops, sequestering themselves in order to plug away at the fragments as though they were darning socks, only poking their heads out when spring came. Finally, we’d witness a pell-mell parade of mavericks, traitors wearing cloaks and certainly equipped with daggers, coups de théâtre, secret alliances and double crosses, misunderstood heroes, visionaries booed by the crowd, outsiders, evil rumormongers who’ll turn out to be right, but too late; conservatives, guardians of tradition, daredevils, avant-gardists preoccupied with their own exploits, patient men, scrupulous men, melancholic men, pranksters; and beside them men of power, and other men still in possession of the papal tiara; and elsewhere, in bistros, a poet and disenchanted drinker who will defend his reputation as such to the death, confessing to his neighbor, loyal, excommunicated, and obliging, his desire to add just one line of his own to those that have already been written.

Sagas begin with endless genealogies, ours with the regrets of a man sitting with his elbows on a window ledge (we’ll call him Hermann Sax). In an age when considerable fortunes (sometimes described as pharaonic) are amassed in less than fifteen days thanks to a roll of the dice or a well-executed scheme, he considers it his Ironic and Vexing Destiny to still be living in a state of abject poverty, dining on bread dipped in broth (black bread/clear broth). And yet he lives in the 1890s, the age of blast furnaces, of black and profitable smoke, of playing the stock market as though it were a carnival (with a great many people milling about the carousels, stuffed bears as big as double basses, lots of cigars and pyrotechnics); the age of companies that actually produce things, of printing presses, of family names inked overnight in great black letters, still damp, on the front pages of newspapers, and then cast in still larger letters on signs made of zinc—an era when you can become the king of the toaster oven at the age of twenty-three (or the prince of the rubber tire, or the mogul—why not?—of ball bearings, or the czar of the paper clip): with genius sitting astride his shoulders, any nice poor boy, tormented by life, refused by his future family-in-law and hounded by creditors insensitive to the delicate nature of poets, can invent the ballpoint pen—naturally without forgetting to file a patent—and thereafter spend the rest of his life reconstructing the hanging gardens of Babylon around his country villa. Not that fabulous wealth like this will just land in your lap: in this industrious world you’ve got to be able wrest your fate away from the chains of reality, which is to say from the injustices of birth: you can become somebody, you can have your own stock portfolio, if only you bring the nail file into the world at the very moment it’s needed (or the bottle cap, or the sulfur match, or the bookmark: the important thing is to think of it first).

These are the regrets of a man resting his elbows on a windowsill looking out over a square in Göttingen, in Germany, in Lower Saxony, the country of moors and fauns, at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead of wallowing in sorrow, Hermann might have been happy, had only the winds of fortune—to use his expression—been more favorable to him. A bit of money from the Sax family, Belgian and then Franco-Belgian, might have fallen into his wool stockings—not quite the gold of Orinoco but enough to wipe his slate clean (he imagines that the saxophone business must be lucrative, and he’s angry with himself for not having come up with it himself: that is, for not having invented an improbable instrument made of twisted brass tubes and little pads manipulated with keys, and then giving it his name). By statistical measure, Hermann Sax isn’t a poor man, he has a few diplomas that should allow him to reach comfortable heights in the civil service, and though the rugs there might not be quite as plush as in certain embassies, at least he has the pleasure of a writing desk and blotting paper (for the rest, he’d only need to lead a life of reserve, with little luxury, or endure ten years of abstinence in exchange for three months of banquets, a cruise down the Danube, accompanied by musicians and veiled women).

In the end, it’s his passion for manuscripts that finishes him off. Not the dancers of the Danube, not the lure of travel, not speculating in oil: no, it’s the autograph that does him in, his desire for the certitude of having a few scratches left behind by dead geniuses stuffed in a drawer—of all the myriad roads to perdition, the collection of manuscripts is surely one of the most sensible; yet the author of a Life of Hermann Sax, remembering the tales of Hoffmann and the stories of Poe, along with a few bits of nonsense from Balzac, couldn’t fail to scent sulfur in these stories of a gentle and calm collector: in certain dark circumstances, associating oneself with antiquarian books, actual grimoires (dear God!), or even just the signatures scribbled at the bottom of a notary’s forms can all lead to misadventures of the most diabolical sort: a pact, or a trap, an obsession—a headlong rush right into the pit. Ah, but none of that for Hermann Sax. He didn’t discover a book from Satan’s personal library, he didn’t betray a seret society of sorcerers, and he was never pursued by a gang of Vatican librarians accompanied by assassins—no, he merely gets swindled by a pair of forgers—call them calligraphers, imitators who can transform a Montaigne into a Milton just by changing pens—he has to suffer the fate of those who love authenticity above all else—fraud. Naturally he can’t just recuperate his losses by selling the items once he’s discovered they’re fakes—not only because his civil-servant ethics would never allow him to commit such a crime, but also because he’s convinced that no one else could fall for such crude imitations of Wieland, or for a Klopstock written in red ink—that’s right: red.

A Life of Hermann Sax would have to be gracious, if it wanted to do him justice; it couldn’t dally too long on those imitations of Kleist purchased for however many marks (while one of the two scoundrels is wielding a pen back in their workshop, his accomplice in front, in the boutique, reveals one treasure after another, taking them out of their leather wraps)—instead, the author would speak of Sax’s great attentiveness, his curiosity, the long hours spent working every evening, and over his many nights of insomnia—one hundred and twenty per year—studying little pieces of paper in order to make them say something they hadn’t yet said, as if they might contain deeper secrets just because they’re handwritten. Every fable must have its miracle, and this, for Hermann Sax, comes in the form of a page from a notebook, with no mention of either time or date, completely empty save a single line of text, only one, in the upper right hand corner, a loop that could be an 8 or a 9, or the serpent in the Book of Genesis, a page attributed by the antiquarian, without a shadow of a doubt, to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Göttingen, professor of mathematics, philosophy, and the physical sciences, inventor of a great many things that he, the fool, should have patented instead of merely having had fun with. Our fable goes so far as to make this piece of Lichtenberg’s writing the only authentic document among hundreds (one could say a hodgepodge) of fakes—like that twenty-five pfennig bill drawn with a felt-tip pen, for example—and suddenly the little Hermann Sax, the Gogolian Hermann, has gotten his big break (which also keeps our tale from turning into a series of cynical and predatory misadventures, poking fun at the Germany between 1890 to 1900, already so full of those chubby faces with three chins and short-cropped hair that will later be seen by the hundreds, squashed upon the canvases of the painters of the time).

You might say he only has a bit part in our story, is almost ridiculously unimportant, but nonetheless, Hermann Sax is special. His importance stems from the fact that everything begins with him, as hard as it might be to accept the idea that a century of Lichtenbergian epistemology can be traced back to one little monkey who worked in legal affairs, in office number forty, in the district of Göttingen. But everything does indeed lead back to Hermann Sax, and to the day he decided to take a close look at his handwriting samples, first with the naked eye, then with a magnifying glass, and finally under a microscope, leading him to the following conclusion: the eight thousand aphorisms signed by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg are actually the scattered fragments of a single work, a novel, a roman-fleuve, perhaps a love story, impossible to know for sure, perhaps an Odyssey on the Vistula, but in any case a complete story that needs only to be put back together again.

He’ll dedicate part of his life to the task—what else could he do? (Bemoan the sorry state of his finances? Stand each morning before his window regretting that he wasn’t the one who invented the Swiss army knife? Throw off his hat every evening, and with it, his duties as a civil servant in office number forty? Watch the time pass, keeping an eye out for Sundays, sitting close to where tall, handsome couples take their walks, like male and female herons, already looking so splendid in springtime, already so happy?) He dedicates half his life to the project: his days are spent in the office, with disputes, bills, and the handling of business affairs in the company of his colleagues—but his evenings, and perhaps even his nights, are spent on obscure undertakings, the dark side if you will, toiling without pay, giving priority to secondary work, to useless and perhaps even hopeless tasks: l’art pour l’art, the secret, the intimacy with genius, the fulfillment of one’s true calling at home on holidays, the aspiration toward something different: Abyssinia as seen from Germany. Hermann Sax at work wouldn’t look like much; just another maniac with scissors, glue, and a notebook—much as some men catalog the feuilletons that appear in the Göttingen Gazette, and others collect all the articles they find about Sarah Bernhardt, Sax’s passion is putting Lichtenberg’s oeuvre back together again.

Scissors, glue, and paper are the tools of the archivist or the compiler: they’re crude but efficient, and yet poorly suited to the work of recombination. What Sax needs is something like Ramon Llull’s logic machine, a sturdy device with catches, roulette wheels, cranks, disks, and rings, a machine that can combine words or hemistichs in pairs as though it were playing dominoes, forcing them to unveil some hidden truth, something unexpected, or unthinkable, or possibly superhuman, or, best of all, divine. That’s exactly what he needs: a device with rods, a mechanism that combines the luck of the roulette wheel with the rigor of a hand weaver, one stitch on one side, another stitch on the other. Hermann Sax, completely dedicated to the written word since he was in short pants, is one of those men whose life turns around quills and ink, at ease among abstractions, a friend of simple numbers (whole, decimal), but clumsy—an understatement—as soon as he has to deal with more concrete things, mechanical things, for example. He’s always dreamed of building a machine capable of producing infinite combinations of Lichtenberg’s fragments; he’s seen it in his imagination, he knows what it should look like, with its rods and its pulleys, and, in his wildest dreams, he’s imagined its latches, its clappers, and a cast-iron pedestal with hinges and a camshaft. Such a device represents for him the little brother to Blaise Pascal’s calculating machine, and his imagination won’t let it go—sometimes he’s overcome with the desire (though without ever acting on it) to go wake up a neighborhood metal worker or a locksmith and have him build, according to his meager specifications, just such an apparatus made from rotating disks. (After his death a crate filled with little disks will be found in his cupboards: they look at first like trowels without handles, or flat wooden plates, but they turn out to be wooden tablets, each inscribed with a short sentence. It’s not hard to imagine Hermann Sax on rainy Sunday afternoons, manipulating these trowels like so many mah-jongg tiles, trying to make sense of them, and you’ve got to admit that it was indeed an improvement over the paper and glue. And, what’s more, the tiles gave Hermann, in his later years, the look of someone playing a board game all by himself—no better way to kill time.)

He died a pauper at the age of ninety. His retirement years should’ve been his triumph; he’d looked forward to the day of his lecture before the Society of Men of Letters, each man’s face adorned with a beautifully spiraling mustache, to his victory of sorts, a victory of mind and patience over enigma and obscurity, a reversal of the laws of thermodynamics, no less: a victory of order over disorder. And, for cultivated minds, for bibliophiles searching for something new, it would have represented the gift of a new holy book to the people, like the Gospel of Gospels found in a pitiful state beneath the sands of Qumran, or the biography of the Man in the Iron Mask, transcribed from a minuscule manuscript scratched out by the fingernail of his right hand inside his armor: THE GRAND NOVEL OF LICHTENBERG. The book of books, the Opus Magnum, as important as the second Faust, but funnier, with the grandeur of Spinoza’s Ethics and and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, a summary of the world, both a universal encyclopedia and comedy of manners,

COLLEGTED, CATALOGED

& CORRECTED BY HAND

BY

HERMANN GÖTTLIEB HANS KASPER SAX

MAN OF LETTERS

AT GÖTTINGEN

MDCCCXCVI.

He always thought he was within inches of achieving his goal (to achieve your goal: the expression of an amateur inventor, which was what Sax had always aspired to be: had he taken one of those hefty bachelorettes of Göttingen as his wife, he’d have served her the words achieve and goal at every meal, in order to provide meaning to their lives and consistency to their future: a future made radiant by the goal and the achievement, both words being as desirable as rapture). In Sax’s eyes, successfully bringing together the fragment [H90] He appreciated above all the words that were not usually found in the dictionary, and the fragment [J1204] He spoke of human passions as if they were controlled by a thunderstorm, in order to produce the sentence, completely coherent to him: He appreciated above all the words that were not usually found in the dictionary [and] spoke of human passions as if they were controlled by thunderstorms, would be the proof of the existence of a superior intelligence at work behind them, which is to say that the pieces are held together by a single meaning, or a single story, in the same way that a vital force holds together the molecules of our bodies: one single novel as big as a cow, rather than a handful of stones, scattered about in order to throw us off track.

Gogolesque, this busybody in office number forty, a man wearing shining silk, small in stature, though not so short, alas, that he could pass for a troll, and so live a fairy-tale life with impunity: Hermann Sax, undaunted amateur exegete, convinced that he could find meaning—call it narrative, for want of a better word—by bringing together the fragment [C 7] We find in Portugal, in the library at Mafra, one hundred volumes of the life of Saint Anthony and the fragment [F 909] Write a text on the diverse ways of giving and taking loose tobacco.

(What is loosed upon the world by combining Saint Anthony and a catalogue of the forms of tobacco consumption? Let’s take a look: Anthony is the saint in the desert, the saint par excellence, as the French say (crème de la crème), the first in a long line, with the exception of the Hebrew patriarchs. Okay, but what else? From him descends Saint Benedict with his monastic rigor, Augustine with his apologetics, John of the Cross with his visions, Ignatius of Loyola with his soul of fire, but none of this tells us very much, and it’s clear that we’d need a hundred Lives of Saint Anthony to exhaust the hundred possible Anthonys: the psychedelic Anthony, the solitary Anthony, the sickly Anthony, Anthony the tourist, Anthony confronted by his Church, Anthony the father superior of the monasteries, and Anthony the collector of handfuls of sand. How about the tobacco? A luxury shared with the poor, a middle ground between gluttony and medication, stupefaction torn from the Earth; the smoke of warriors before, during, or after battle; an exotic delicacy similar to tea but consumed by coarse men in rooms built for precisely that purpose, ending up either in a spittoon or in clouds above their heads—and we haven’t even mentioned nicotine yet, which, for all we know, is the one thing we can indeed take along with us to paradise. But what do the consumption of tobacco and the multiple lives of Saint Anthony have in common? The concept of temptation? A pact with the devil? The search for inspiration through narcotics? Or does attempting to link Anthony and tobacco ultimately mean being prepared to try anything to make some sense out of mankind as a whole?)

The saxophone: invented by Adolphe Sax, who also invented the saxhorn, which didn’t meet with quite the same success.

The conjecture of Hermann Sax can be formulated roughly as follows: The eight thousand Lichtenberg fragments are the excerpts of a whole that must be put back together again.

[J 2154] In nature we find, not words, but only the initial letters of words.

SUMMARY OF LICHTENBERG’S LIFE

We already know about his birth: the difficult labor, Henriette Catharina’s cervix, the fabulous nature of the century in question, the obstetrician on horseback in the middle of the night, the marriage of medical gothic and interior domestic scenes in the manner of the Dutch masters—and from the beginning, from the very first minutes of Lichtenberg’s life, a tiny body, twisted and bulging, presenting itself rather poorly to the world through the fragile opening offered by his mother—nevertheless, his birth is a victory (one shared by Georg Christoph, Henriette, and Johann Conrad Lichtenberg). After his birth, he spends his entire childhood in Darmstadt, enough time to forge that singular, precise, and autonomous spirit, sharing every idea, every intuition, and every new finding (pointing his finger to the right page) with his classmates like a precious secret, or, if no one cares to listen, keeping them all to himself. Already as a child he begins to dabble in the study of astronomy, botany, the hard sciences, the newly founded physical chemistry, Lavotier’s little bubbles, experiments with gas, laboratory miracles in the form of spectacular explosions or liquids changing color in test tubes. At the same age, all the other little boys scrape their knees, systematically, before moving on to playing with jacks. And then at fourteen they’re ready to give up their carefree existences, their skinned knees, their dominos, and their robin hunts for the ceremonious adventures of skirts and slips with their counterparts, the neighborhood Margarethes and Elfrieds. Young Lichtenberg, however, is too busy discovering free-thinking and the scientific method: he spends hours, for example, contemplating his toes in order to work out a theory of nail growth.

According to the chronologies, the fifteen-year-old Georg Christoph reads the two Testaments of the Bible in his left hand while holding the Thousand and One Nights in his right: which probably encouraged not only a great independence in his various extremities (though this is only a hypothesis), but serves as a proof (yet another) of his own autonomy, not to mention providing us with a singular and profane manner of approaching sacred texts.

The life of a poor man, or perhaps a man of little means: a little poorer and Georg Christoph would’ve held the yoke of the oxen till the day he died; he’d have become a stock breeder to earn his bread—gray or black, bran or wheat—devoting his intelligence and his science to his evening reveries, beneath his down blanket, after a day of hard (heavy on the hard) labor. But there are such things as fairy godmothers, in the form of university scholarships, so the twenty-year-old Lichtenberg steps foot into the University of Göttingen for the first time (in 1763), and he won’t leave again for a while. His life appears to pass peacefully thereafter, a story that could be told in a dozen lines at most, unless we allow ourselves to make comments in the same way that gossip (well or ill-intentioned) is exchanged around the coffin of a dead man: the life of a professor of mathematics at the university, writing little texts for himself only, or for his drawer, a few newspaper editorials read or written, lessons on the calculation of probabilities, two trips to London, hardly more, otherwise a sedentary existence, a love of England and the English language, a few mistresses or love affairs, to which we will return later, and illnesses collected at first like trophies, then like stuffed animals, then like IOUs, and finally as a series of reasons to worry. A life alternating between periods of profound melancholy and happy hours of excitement, like those spent studying the phases of Venus or the treelike structure of lightening. There’s the temptation of suicide, and the great solitude he secures for himself at his home in Göttingen, before turning to his experiments in electricity. And of course there are always more illnesses—varied, heterogeneous, and complementary—performed upon woodwinds, brass, strings, and percussion. In the end, a kind of tranquility and fatigue, and the illusion of wisdom, until his last day on Earth in 1799.

HOW TO BREAK UP A ROMAN-FLEUVE, I

Scissors, Family

There are several ways to transform a roman-fleuve into a series of fragments: the first is obviously to get yourself a pair of scissors and to act slowly and methodically, with determination, on a peaceful Sunday afternoon (provided that it rains). This is how you’ve got to do it, with precision rather than with rage, because reducing something to fragments isn’t an act of vandalism; it doesn’t mean, for example, tearing something to shreds, or tasting the pleasures of self-mutilation, or even experiencing once again the childish triumph of simple destruction, back when all you needed was a hammer to find out what was inside a toy. The act of fragmentation is elaborate; it must take the cautious writer of anonymous letters as its model, the sort of person who cuts up the front page of the Times, then the inner pages, the business section, the variety section, before turning to the news in brief to find the one word he’s been looking for, or, if he really has to, taking what he needs from the literary supplement—with his thumb and index finger all the while inserted into the handles of his pair of scissors with the utmost delicacy. Any man wishing to cut his oeuvre into pieces (a single roman-fleuve or a dozen) can take inspiration from these masked figures, though they might be highly dubitable sorts: he must learn from their meticulousness, their determination, the skill with which they hide their tracks, and from their admirable dedication to recycling—not to mention such models as the anagram, perhaps the pastiche, the false citation: he must assemble a sort of Manual of the Great Art of Scissors and Combination, with which even the most miserable rogue can uncover the hidden (but not necessarily profound) messages behind the words written in the London dailies. He’ll learn to be satisfied with little, to make do with whatever he finds at hand, in short; to resist boredom, to be clever despite his meager means; to be laconic; to appear smarter than what he writes; to give the impression that he’s addressing one particular person in the crowd; and he’ll learn how to take his leave: he too would like to complete his oeuvre without signing it, by assuring the reader that he is his friend, and that he desires nothing but the best for him.

Scattering a roman-fleuve isn’t easy: for authors of talent, the attentive care of a sibling is best, if they weren’t lucky enough to have died alone, without the slightest bit of contact, even residual, with their family. Yes, the attentive care of a brother or a sister will usually do the trick, because they always keep their promises: you just have to imagine a poet down on his luck, not yet humiliatingly dependent, but getting there, making his way down the various degrees of the decline of an artist: distraction, abstraction, separation from the world, incapacity followed by catalepsy; the poet or the novelist has to have fallen into silence, the archives must be abundant and unpublished, piles and piles of boxes, the nuisances of quantity and humidity; the editors have to have lost interest already, their once very real infatuations now grown cold, the author’s glory years having receded into the distant past of a different age, that of the horse-drawn carriage; the novel must be poorly bound, pages and pages with a final full stop nowhere to be found, yet perhaps containing the very stuff of genius; and there have got to be a few vague admirers still out there, somewhere or other, believing their poet already dead, believing that his tomb can be found in the cemetery at Weimar, between Schiller and Goethe; in such circumstances the care of an adorable and enterprising sister is required, well or ill-intentioned, preoccupied as she is not only with increasing the family’s capital but above all with clearing those piles of paper out of the attic in order to make room for a billiard table; our author must be caught unawares, lulled to sleep by the assurance of having his little sister at his side—his marshal’s baton, his nurse—and one fine morning the deed will be done, the hatch to the oven opened and shut more than a few times.

A wife can stand in for the sister, if necessary, and a husband for the brother: the wife, the future widow, femme fatale, representing all those dangerous women of folklore, an entire invisible gynecocracy, only perceptible in the last minutes of lucidity, just before death, a jumble of plots, malicious gossip, incompetence, and frivolity, a Greek myth in the flesh. To complete this hastily-drawn portrait: a widow who is determined, after mourning for an afternoon, to sell everything to the highest bidder, to sign profitable beneficiary agreements, ready to divide everything into parts if she’ll get more money for them—she’d sell the left foot separate from the right if she could (but, if in doing so she manages to give her deceased husband the reputation of having been a poet’s poet, her plan to sell everything, right down to the last noun, can’t be dismissed as a sheer fantasy).

The family isn’t without its resources: if the wife should die, there’s always the son, and after the son, the other inheritors, fifteen people around an oval table, almost complete strangers, notoriously hateful to one another, glaring about under the watchful authority of a notary, on the day the problems of succession must be resolved (a castle in joint tenancy, ravenous cousins). Under different circumstances, they would’ve divided up the chamber pot, the kerosene lamp, the keys to the cupboard, the tobacco pouch equitably, without resorting to algebraic equations or economics (one portrait of an old uncle = three pillowcases). This is how normal families proceed, but those unlucky enough to be the descendants of a graphomaniac are forced to divvy up a thousand, or even ten thousand suffocating pieces of paper, which can’t even be used to make business cards. They might make out all right, however, if they can sell the paper by weight—someone always knows someone who knows a puppeteer at the corner of Hegel Street and Kant Avenue who buys paper to stuff his little figurines. But then the least moronic (or the greediest) member of the tribe speaks up before a great mountain of cousins to say that at the other end of the street, at the corner of Tieck and Lenz, there’s an antique dealer, a specialist in handwritten documents—beautiful Haydns written with a goose plume taken from the Esterházy estate—just the place to earn years of golden Christmases for themselves if they can manage to sell everything off in pieces, little by little, keeping in mind how value increases in proportion to rarity.

The Grand Art of Scissors and Recombination: apropos those anonymous letters.

THE SOCIETY OF THE LICHTENBERG ARCHIVES, I

The Beginnings, Glyceryl Trinitrate

The men in Gothenburg, Sweden, are highly serious figures, each crowned with a top hat: if they were to stand together for a group photo, for instance, you might think they were andirons, or crenels; even their mustaches are severe and judicious, they don’t turn upward like those of certain French braggarts (you can’t be both a rogue and a ballroom charmer at the same time, you have to choose): no, they droop downward, they accept the law of universal gravitation—and as for the gentlemen themselves, they fully endorse God’s decisions on the matter. They are Germanophones: in 1899 they’ll have read Wieland, Jean Paul Richter, Lessing, Grabbe, and a few of them even adventure through the boreal jungle of High German, toward the obscurities of Scandinavia, toward the Nibelung and Loki and Yggdrasil. Others follow a less archaic path, leading from the Germany of Jean Paul to the England of Thomas de Quincy, passing through Carlyle and picking up a few humorists along the way: these men hope to show, despite their grave look of crenels or merlons with drooping mustaches, that Germania isn’t just the birthplace of philologists and dictionaries as thick as the royal castle of Stockholm, but that it’s also home to a few comic writers (wags and pranksters), that it was the origin, indeed, of the witz, before it was exported throughout the continent, and thence to Great Britain. They’ve collected archives; their bookshelves groan with no fewer than twenty-seven copies of Goethe and Eckermann’s Conversations; everything’s carefully labeled in their libraries, and is available to any student, researcher, or really any honest man or woman, though the latter is rare, because she wears neither a top hat nor a drooping mustache, and because Scandinavia has yet to embrace the feminist movement (though it shouldn’t be much longer now). And next to the several shelves of Goethe can be found the works of Hebel, Lenz, and even Bonaventure, and there’s even one tiny volume attributed to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (though even this falls more under the heading of comedy than serious literature).

These men belong to the University, to the Department of Germanic Languages, their vocation is to lift schoolboys out of the torture of the der-die-das to bring them to the paradise of Hölderlin’s verses; they’re at ease with both the Rheingold and the farces of Jean Paul Richter; like many scholars and writers, they’re level-headed men, convinced that they will ensure a lasting peace in Europe through the study of their books, to the sound of pages turning, the sonority of paper angels. During the 1890s, while organizing public readings of Wieland’s Abderites, they catch word of an insignificant bureaucrat in Göttingen, a rumor carried by the wind from the south over the Baltic Sea: a bureaucrat with a little name, a name like the sound of a sneeze, Wurtz, or Plick, or Sax, and his Conjecture—yes, that’s right, his Conjecture. It may be difficult to believe, but suddenly, as if on command, the six or seven heads wearing top hats begin to nod from right to left, left to right. But don’t be fooled, this is only a sign of great nervousness in men ordinarily so calm—this, for them, might almost qualify as a frenzy: imagine the effect that the discovery of Jesus’s baby bib would have on an assembly of Christians.

They call it the conjecture of Sax, and so it will be known for more than a century, still in use in 1999, when the modern world stands as stiff as a pole, far removed from the flaccid arts of 1900 and the drooping tubes of (almost all) saxophones. The conjecture of Sax supposes, let’s remember, that the eight thousand fragments attributed to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg are actually pieces of a single, immense work (an Immense Whatsit, anyway), to be referred to as the Novel, and this conjecture has the following corollaries (never part of any official doctrine): 1) the work of the archivists shall consist of finding the correct order of the fragments, which was lost during their dispersal; 2) such an enterprise will be as much dependent on patience as on inspiration, which means that the workings of chance must also be taken into consideration, in order not to force the author’s work into incorrect configurations; 3) it’s not completely by chance that the fragments appear as wholly self-contained aphorisms: ergo, their dispersal, rather than being accidental, is the result of a conscious will; 4) ergo, the extent of this conscious will must be determined, as well as its particular genus and species; 5) (extrapolation) it’s not completely unimaginable that each fragment contains in its own way the key to the entire work, if not a summary thereof.

Hermann Sax was but a simple layer of tracks; he closed the door behind himself: in another life, he might have spent his days building a cathedral out of snail shells, fixing them together with some form of mortar, perhaps papier-mâché. The six or seven mustached scholars from the University of Gothenburg are cast from an altogether different mold: no eccentrics, these men are professors, prima dozent, lecturers and a dean; they’ve got the cold heads required to be methodical; and, as the inheritors of the conjecture, they’ll give to it what only they can give: a solid structure, a theoretical framework, funding, and a quarterly bulletin. No longer the extravagant labors of a single lost lamb, the project will become a Society, the Society of the Lichtenberg Archives, legally registered, attached like a barnacle to the rock of the university, and supported by a foundation, the Sudelbücher Stiftung, invented for the occasion. It’s set up with a handsome endowment—more than enough to inspire jealousy in certain quarters—replenished once a year, naturally in spring, according to the rhythm of the floods of the Nile, born from the bounty of Lake Victoria (the endowment represents more than enough money to have their entire headquarters repainted at least twelve times a year, if they want, or to bind the complete works of Ernst Theodor Amadeus (Wilhelm) Hoffmann with gold thread—expenditures are approved by a show of hands). Though prosperous, the Society of the Archives must remain disinterested, as it were, according to its bylaws (a not-for-profit organization), which explains why it doesn’t bother itself with marketing or trying to make money from its brochures, selling copies of the Lichtenberg Journal or the Colloquium Acts, which are only made available to the public in order to pay for their own printing costs. It should also be added that the Stiftung wasn’t set up all at once; the first years of the Society were spent in the admirable, heroic, and joyous destitution of all early pioneers, which made all of the members feel younger, even the dean. The statutes had to be rushed through in order for the organization to exist in an official capacity before 1899, so as to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the death of Georg Christoph and to mark the occasion with the dignity of which only these Swedish gentlemen were capable. The first months and then years were barren, wholly do-it-yourself, getting together at one member’s house and then another’s, to share the cost of the soup—but this life of apostles in the Scandinavian desert couldn’t last; the life of a peasant gets old pretty quickly, forever having to blow on one’s fingers to stay warm, but then the miracle came, brought

Reviews for Fragments of Lichtenberg

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The literary remains of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg include a series of notebooks, known as the "Waste Books", that consist of hundreds of aphorisms linked only by Lichtenberg's ironic philosophy and sharp observations. It is known that he wrote them in hopes of creating a novel, but that novel was never completed.

This novel imagines a group of scholars, "the Lichtenbergians", whose purpose is to assemble the fragments and uncover Lichtenberg's masterpiece. Various attempts are described: Noah's Ark, Punchinello, Ovid's return to Rome, and a retelling of Dafoe's Robinson Caruso. Along with these attempts, the lives of the Lichtenbergians and vignettes from Lichtenberg's life are presented in a seemingly endless series of short chapters.

I've been looking forward to reading this book since I first learned that Daley Archive were publishing it a few years ago. Now that it's finally out, it goes a long way to meeting my expectations. However, whether due to the vagaries of translation or shortcomings in the original, I found it a bit disappointing: the wit is a bit stale, the erudition limited, the verbosity overwrought.

Still, I would much rather spend my time reading an ambitious work with a flawed execution such as this than the tedious perfection of the unadventurous pablum that passes for literary fiction these days.

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While there are a few contenders left, Fragments might prove to be my favorite book of the year. Infinitely idiosyncratic, Pierre Senges assembled not just a palace from Lichtenberg but a protean atlas thereof. Oozing-beyond-rich erudition delights each page. References dance in an angelic choreography, the ideas of fragmentation and assembly move to the fore and then pirouette outward in bemused orbits as the text itself follows the efforts of various Lichtenberg specialists as they ponder the fate of the “missing” elements from the 18C eccentric polymath. A rough consensus forms that the surviving aphorisms must have been part of a larger text, the specialists lean towards a novel. But what novel, what sort? Nothing strictly like Casanova for Lichtenberg was hunchbacked and his phrases aim toward invention: both literary and scientific.

The wayward adventures of Punchinello are constructed from the extant aphorisms. My only wish in this delightful section was that the character had stayed in Russia longer than the three allotted pages.

Other options explored regard Ovid’s Black Sea exile and a Rousseau filtered Robinson Crusoe. Each gloss is spectacular even in translation.

Gogol features late in the work and one could gauge the remaining trajectory. I thought about Gogol last night watching Equinox Flower, the camera pausing on the cross adorning the hospital asked certain questions. Gogol here is rather a shorthand for religious madness and the opinion of tossing one’s words into the flames.

[stillatim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Senges is a bright light: someone who can write fiction that is novel in form but also rejects the tiresome cliches of most literature that is novel in form (really, we're all alone in this world and love will save us? You don't say, well, I'm really looking forward to pondering that at the end of your 900 page opus). Here, he gives us a 'history' of people trying to put some order into the notebooks of Georg Lichtenberg, and some passages supposedly by Lichtenberg, and a biography, of sorts, of Lichtenberg, and the stories told by the people trying to put the notebooks into order, which are mostly parodies or pastiches of well-known stories, and the stories of the people putting those notebooks in order by telling stories, and Senges winds all of this together to tell the history, intellectual and otherwise, of the twentieth century, while defending a number of values that have been fairly undefended since Lichtenberg died and romanticism became the go-to standpoint of most people (let's all empathize with the down-and-out indiviualist hero standing up revolutionarily against the man! but without thinking about it too much, because thinking is bad for you!)

It's also beautifully written, massively digressive, and way too much to take it at once.

So, I love it. Here are some pull-quotes.

"He's worried about the next century, or even the next two, when men, out of a sense of propriety, will forbid themselves the use of irony,a nd will find it natural to have masters: they'll be admirers, they'll collect busts, the busts of poets, the busts of generals and heads of state, it makes no difference: men with so little confidence in their own ironic natures, considering their expression to be a crime (an incongruity, a breach of good manners) that ought to be replaced by deference."

"(glory to that which gives itself to be understood, a curse on that which is satisfied with merely existing, a thousand curses on that which tries to keep deeds and facts away from interpreters and interpretations: they're more miserable than a pair of Vandals, who tear a ciborium from a priest's hands to use it as a spittoon.)"

"Romanticism is flourishing almost everywhere, but you, Georg Christoph, you stick to your old-fashioned rationalism, you continue to prefer reason over emotion, persuaded that even though reason may lead to emotion, emotion never leads to reason. And while Goethism is decorating all of Europe with its flowers--pomp, sentimentalism, dilettantism in science, good morals in politics--you refuse to change, you refuse both the flowers and Goethe, his paper lanterns and the streamers: you prefer the intelligence of Jonathan Swift, which resembles two jaws clamped over a live mouse; so don't be surprised if your neighbors, some of them, remove your name from their address books."

And the entirety of the final twenty pages.

NB: very, very poor proofreading. Dalkey Archive, if you're out there, I'll proofread this stuff for you, and all I need, payment wise, is books.