Faust, Part I, Vol. 1 Book

I reread Faust yesterday, and it left me wondering ... pondering ... again ... as so often!

Why don't we talk more about Gretchen? And I mean Gretchen as a subject, not as a toy to be used by Faust and Mephistopheles in their joint midlife crisis distractive game?

Why don't we talk more about the amazing achievements of the modern world, in which a brother like Valentin wouldn't get to call his sister a whore for having a lover? Why don't we talk more about the bliss of choice? Gretchen today could have her dark affair with a middle-aged charismatic narcissist and then raise a child on her own. She doesn't have to die (or marry to become Dorothy to Casauban or Effi to Innstetten either!). Let us celebrate the end of Gretchen's life as a social evil and the beginning of Gretchen as a sexual being without guilt, shame and doom? The world will never be free from Faustian egomaniacs, but they may face women who speak up and expect more than Gretchen ever could for herself. Gretchen lived too early, too much.

Just some thoughts on reading Faust yet again!

This is not a review. More a continued discussion with myself on a play that keeps challenging me since high school.

I cannot attempt to write a review of Goethe's Faust. It is a much too personal experience, growing with each time I reread it. Since high school, I have been thinking at least five times:

"This is the perfect Goethe moment, his work is written for ME, NOW, it can't get any better, deeper, or any more satisfying."

Well, apparently it can. After maybe three or four years, I picked up Faust again, and found that I had finally grown up enough to identify with his most famous quote, the one I had reverently learned by heart as a student.

Banging my head against the wall today while marking papers, trying to figure out how to explain the developments in the world to my own children and the adolescents I am in charge of, I looked up and literally felt Mephisto's presence in the room. Unable to get rid of the feeling, I looked at my shelf with my all time favourites, picked up my Faust, with its almost broken spine, and opened it to read ...

... my own life ...

...the struggle to find answers, the longing for knowledge and understanding, the futile hope that my teaching will make a difference, and the creepy, scary thought that it might all be meaningless, because the majority of our planet is sold, body and soul, to devilish shallowness and indifference.

... It almost sets my heart burning ...

"Now here I am, a fool for sure!
No wiser than I was before:
Master, Doctor's what they call me,
And I've been ten years, already,
Crosswise, arcing, to and fro,
Leading my students by the nose,
And see that we can know - nothing!
It almost sets my heart burning."

"Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum -
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
Das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen."

As hopeless as the message and the rest of the Faust plot is, it gave me solace to share this moment, yet again, with the master of masters, Goethe.

Now here I am, a fool for sure!