"And then how tame and weak has life itself become during the last two shabby centuries. Where do we now meet an original nature? and where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?"
»Und dann, wie zahm und schwach ist seit den lumpigen paar hundert Jahren nicht das Leben selber geworden! Wo kommt uns noch eine originelle Natur unverhüllt entgegen! Und wo hat einer die Kraft, wahr zu sein und sich zu zeigen, wie er ist!«
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Sunday, May 23, 2021
Tame and Weak
Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (January 2, 1824; tr. John Oxenford):