'It is a bad business', Eduard cried, 'that we cannot nowadays learn anything that will last a lifetime. Our forefathers stuck to the teaching they were given when they were young, but we have to unlearn everything every five years if we are not to go completely out of fashion.'
„Es ist schlimm genug“, rief Eduard, „daß man jetzt nichts mehr für sein ganzes Leben lernen kann. Unsre Vorfahren hielten sich an den Unterricht, den sie in ihrer Jugend empfangen; wir aber müssen jetzt alle fünf Jahre umlernen, wenn wir nicht ganz aus der Mode kommen wollen“.
"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).
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Tuesday, September 30, 2025
A Bad Business
Goethe, Elective Affinities, Part I, Chap. 4 (tr. David Constantine):