Late last year I mentioned Max Brod’s biography of Heine. Today, hoping against hope to get my desk cleared off, I ran across it in a stack of books set aside for reshelving. But there were all these little post-it notes sticking out, making the book look like a tattered flag. I had meant to write something coherent about it, but since I have so much work in front of me I’d better settle for passing along the quotes I’ve marked. These are in addition to the passage I quoted in that earlier post, and some are simply Brod’s quotations from other authors:
From Goethe: “It makes all the difference whether I strive to emerge from the light into the dark, or from the dark into the light; whether, finding clarity uncongenial, I shroud myself in obscurity, or whether, convinced that clarity lies at the bottom of depths that have been plumbed with difficulty, I do my best to bring up all that is possible from these depths that are always so hard to put into words.”
*
From Novalis: “The outward appearance is the inner core elevated to the status of a mystery—and perhaps vice versa too.”
*
Brod nutshelling Heine’s view of language: “Let us gain entry to the hungry stomach, let us have soup-logic and dumpling-reasoning only, roast-beef arguments only. All that is required is to abolish the hungry stomach; immediately the poet will be delighted to adopt more elegant language!”
*
On Heine’s wit: “As long as wit indicates nothing more than that its possessor regards his own ego as something so colossal that the whole world fades into nothingness by comparison—it is sheer vanity. Wit always has an element of the incommensurable in it. But on the higher level of wit this incommensurability will show itself in the ego’s acknowledging its powerlessness vis-à-vis the world, its inability to bridge the gulf between the world and itself by ordinary means. On the lower level of wit, however, it is the ego which is incomparably great, and vis-à-vis which the world becomes unreal.”
*
Quoting from Heine’s epilogue to his Romanzero: “”I have renounced nothing, not even my old pagan gods, from whom I have turned away, I admit, but parting from them in love and friendship. It was in May, 1848, on the day when I went out for the last time, that I took my leave of the charming idols I had worshipped in the days of my happiness. It was with an effort that I managed to drag myself to the Louvre, and I almost collapsed on entering the sublime hall where the mod blessed goddess of beauty, our dear Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. A long time I lay at her feet, and I wept so bitterly that a stone would have taken pity. The goddess, too, looked down on nye compassionately, but cheerlessly with all, as if to say: ‘Don’t you see I have no arms and cannot help?'”
*
On illumination: “During the course of a fairly lengthy stay in the Southern Carnic Alps I climbed one day to a height that commanded a magnificent view. It struck me very forcibly that from this height not only could I see the peaks of the Carnic Alps that had become so familiar to me from my stay in the region, the peaks that soared out of the landscape and joined with it to constitute a system of mountain heights and valleys and torrents; but that the great Alps themselves tithe the Gross Glockner chain were also visible to me. In the pure mountain air the thought crossed my mind: the peaks of the mountains see each other. To themselves they lie cheek by jowl: what though from the valley below only one or other of the glacier masses is visible? It is only here able that their true relationship becomes apparent. Each of these peaks belongs to its own valley-system, would not be complete without the lesser heights surrounding it, resembles and is serviceable to them in structure, vegetation, etc. Yet: the peaks of the mountains are a world in themselves, assigned to each other and enjoying eternal uninterrupted communication with each other.”
*
Quoting Heine on French poetry, in which he argues that the materialist philosophy and education French poets experience leaves them capable only of “reflection, passion and sentimentality”: “Sentimentality is a product of materialism. In the soul of the materialist, you see, there is a glimmering consciousness of the fact that everything in the world is not matter, after all. Sentimentality is matter in despair because it can never be self-sufficient, and in its yearning for something better finding an outlet in vague emotionalism. I have in fact found that it was always the sentimental authors who in the privacy of their own homes, or when wine had loosened their tongue, were most prone to display their materialism in language that left nothing to the imagination.”
*
On Heine’s opposition to materialism: “Nor were Heine’s continued attacks … on the gods of astuteness and utilitarianism, on the era of railways and capitalism, merely the outpourings of an aesthetic trifler. Behind the Romantic veil was the proclamation of the living soul’s right to mystery, greatness, infinity, incomprehensibility. Precisely for this reason the citizen monarchy with its pronounced leveling tendencies was a bitter pill for Heine to swallow.”
*
On Heine’s refusal to simplify: “Heine does not make things easy for himself; he does not simplify. In this respect he reveals his true love of mankind and of life. Simplification is the sign by which the foes of mankind and of life recognize each other! Not, indeed, that what I might call the negative of simplification should be employed either: the trick of representing what is in fact quite simple as so complicated that all generalization, all responsibility is evaded.”
*
On Heine philosophy: “In [Heine’s] History of Religion and Philosophy (1834) he opposes spiritualism (meaning the cult of the spiritual), materialism, and sensualism to each other. Spiritualism he regards as the insolent claim of the spirit to rule alone, seeking pleasure in abstinence and in the denial of the flesh and in pain. Sensualism, on the other hand, he regards with the Saint-Simonists as the union of spiritual and sensual postulates, the harmony of spirit and body. He distinguishes sensualism from materialism, in which the spirit, innate ideas, are denied. Materialism, then, is one-sided, just as is spiritualism, only in the opposite direction. Heine rejected the one-sidedness both of spiritualism and materialism. In sensualism he saw the synthesis, the middle path and the harmony which he sought. He identifies sensualism with Spinoza’s pantheism: God is everything that is, he is body as well as spirit, ‘both are equally divine, and whoever offends against holy matter is as sinful as he who sins against the Holy Ghost.'”
*
Quoting Heine, from his book on the German author Börne (his harshest critic and putative rival): “I say ‘Nazarene’ to avoid using either ‘Jewish’ or ‘Christian,’ although the two words are synonymous for me and I use them to describe, not a religion, but a temper of mind. ‘Jews’ and ‘Christians’ are for me words of similar meaning and I oppose them to ‘Hellenes,’ an expression which, again, I use to designate, not a particular nation, but an intellectual disposition and outlook which may be either innate or the result of upbringing. In this sense I would say: ‘All men are either Jews or Hellenes, people who hate imagery and are of an ascetic, spiritualizing temper, or down-to-earth people who rejoice in life and in its possibilities of self-development.'”
Now I can put the book back in my library!
"Simplification is the sign by which the foes of mankind and of life recognize each other!"<br /><br />Love it!
thanks for reminding me…. of Brod / Heine<br />am lining up my books-to-read this year of<br />two-thousand-and-thirteen<br /><br />have gotten into about 1/2 way <br />Hazony's book : The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture<br />and have had lined up now since about 2000 Weber's biography:<br />Balthus (who was about the BEST landscape painter E V E R)<br /><br />and have just finished