| I told you, I am not concerned with pleasure.
|
| I crave corrosive joy and dissipation,
|
| enamored hate and quickening despair.
|
| My breast no longer thirsts for knowledge
|
| and will welcome grief and pain.
|
1770
| Whatever is the lot of humankind
|
| I want to taste within my deepest self.
|
| I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
|
| to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
|
| and thus expand my single self titanically
|
| and in the end, go down with all the rest.
|
| Believe you him who now for some millennia
|
| has chewed this tough and wretched fare,
|
| that from the cradle to the bier
|
| no man digests the ancient dough!
|
1780
| Believe the likes of me: the single whole
|
| was fashioned for a god alone,
|
| who dwells in everlasting, radiant glow
|
| and relegated us to darkness;
|
| and you must content yourselves with day and night.
|
| Splendid words, for sure!
|
| However, one thing worries me:
|
| Art is long and time is fleeting.
|
| It occurs to me that you might yet be taught.
|
| Make your alliance with a poet,
|
1790
| and let that gentleman think lofty thoughts,
|
| and let him heap the noblest qualities
|
| upon your worthy head:
|
| a lion’s nerve,
|
| a stag’s rapidity,
|
| the fiery blood of Italy,
|
| the constancy of northern man.
|
| Then let him find the secret mortar
|
| to combine nobility of soul with guile
|
| and show you how to love with youthful fervor,
|
1800
| according to a balanced plan.
|
| I’d like myself to meet with such a person,
|
| whom I would greet as Mr. Microcosm.
|
| Good sir, you clearly look upon these things
|
| the way such things are usually looked upon;
|
| we’ll have to find a shrewder method
|
| and not wait until the joys of living flee.
|
1820
| Who gives a damn! One’s hands and feet and toes,
|
| one’s head and bottom are one’s own,
|
| but if I seize and feel an alien thrill,
|
| does it belong the less to me?
|
| If I can buy six stallions for my stable,
|
| is not then their strength my own?
|
| I race along, I am a splendid specimen
|
| as if two dozen legs were mine.
|
| Go to it then! Leave off your ruminations,
|
| and go with me into the teeming world!
|
1830
| To waste your time in idle speculation
|
| is acting like a beast that’s driven in a circle
|
| by evil spirits on an arid moor
|
| while all about lie fair and verdant fields.
|
| We simply go away.
|
| What kind of torture chamber is this place?
|
| What kind of life is this you lead—
|
| a bore for you, a nuisance for your pupils.
|
| Go, leave that to the boob next door.
|
| Why should you plague yourself with threshing straw?
|
1840
| The best of what you hope to know
|
| is something that you cannot tell the youngsters.
|
| There—I hear one coming up the corridor.
|
| The boy has waited long and patiently;
|
| he must not leave unsatisfied.
|
| Quickly, let me take your cap and gown.
|
| It should suit my person handsomely.
|
| (
He changes his clothes
.)
|
| Now trust my wit to handle matters
|
| in no more than fifteen minutes’ time.
|
1850
| Meanwhile, prepare for our trip together.
|
| (
Exit
FAUST
.)
|
| If once you scorn all science and all reason,
|
| the highest strength that dwells in man,
|
| and through trickery and magic arts
|
| abet the spirit of dishonesty,
|
| then I’ve got you unconditionally—
|
| then destiny endowed him with a spirit
|
| that hastens forward, unrestrained,
|
| whose fierce and overhasty drive
|
| leapfrogs headlong over earthly pleasures.
|
1860
| I’ll drag him through the savage life,
|
| through the wasteland of mediocrity.
|
| Let him wriggle, stiffen, wade through slime,
|
| let food and drink be dangled by his lips
|
| to bait his hot, insatiate appetite.
|
| He will vainly cry for satisfaction,
|
| and had he not by then become the devil’s,
|
| he still would perish miserably.
|
| (
A
STUDENT
enters
.)
|
| Make use of time, it flits away so fast;
|
| though you can save it by economy;
|
1910
| wherefore, my worthy friend, I counsel you
|
| to register in Logic first of all,
|
| so your spirit will be neatly drilled
|
| and tightly laced in Spanish boots;
19
|
| and thus, along its winding path,
|
| the thought will creep henceforth more circumspect,
|
| instead of skipping to and fro,
|
| and back and forth like a will-o’-the-wisp;
|
| and you will labor many days
|
| on what you once performed summarily—
|
1920
| just as you ate and drank without constraint
|
| you’ll do it now by “one!” and “two!” and “three!”
|
| by sheer necessity. The living factory of thought
|
| is like a master weaver’s masterpiece,
|
| where one treadle plies a thousand strands,
|
| the shuttles shoot this way and that,
|
| the quivering threads flow unobserved,
|
| one stroke effects a thousand ties.
|
| But now philosophy comes in
|
| and proves it never could be otherwise.
|
1930
| If One is thus and Two is so,
|
| then Three and Four must needs be so,
|
| and if the first and second had not been,
|
| the third and fourth could not occur.
|
| All this is praised by students everywhere;
|
| though none has yet become a weaver.
|
| Who wants to see and circumscribe a living thing
|
| must first expel the living spirit,
|
| for then he has the separate parts in hand.
|
| Too bad! the spirit’s bond is missing.
|
1940
| The chemists call it
Encheiresis Naturae
20
|
| and know not how they mock themselves.
|
