Recenzii recente de JOHN BIDEN

game sucks and has gay people playing it

There stood old Goethe, short and very erect, and on his classic breast, sure enough, was the
corpulent star of some Order. Not for a moment did he relax his commanding attitude, his air of
giving audience, and of controlling the world from that museum of his at Weimar. Indeed, he had
scarcely looked at me before with a nod and a jerk like an old raven he began pompously: "Now,
you young people have, I believe, very little appreciation of us and our efforts."
"You are quite right," said I, chilled by his ministerial glance. "We young people have,
indeed, very little appreciation of you. You are too pompous for us, Excellency, too vain and
pompous, and not outright enough. That is, no doubt, at the bottom of it—not outright enough."
The little old man bent his erect head forward, and as his hard mouth with its official folds
relaxed in a little smile and became enchantingly alive, my heart gave a sudden bound; for all at
once the poem came to my mind—"The dusk with folding wing"—and I remembered that it was
from the lips of this man that the poem came. Indeed, at this moment I was entirely disarmed and
overwhelmed and would have chosen of all things to kneel before him. But I held myself erect
and heard him say with a smile: "Oh, so you accuse me of not being outright? What a thing to
say! Will you explain yourself a little more fully?"
I was very glad indeed to do so.
"Like all great spirits, Herr von Goethe, you have clearly recognised and felt the riddle and
the hopelessness of human life, with its moments of transcendence that sink again to
wretchedness, and the impossibility of rising to one fair peak of feeling except at the cost of
many days' enslavement to the daily round; and, then, the ardent longing for the realm of the
spirit in eternal and deadly war with the equally ardent and holy love of the lost innocence of
nature, the whole frightful suspense in vacancy and uncertainty, this condemnation to the
transient that can never be valid, that is ever experimental and dilettantish; in short, the utter lack
of purpose to which the human state is condemned—to its consuming despair. You have known
all this, yes, and said as much over and over again; yet you gave up your whole life to preaching
its opposite, giving utterance to faith and optimism and spreading before yourself and others the
illusion that our spiritual strivings mean something and endure. You have lent a deaf ear to those hat plumbed the depths and suppressed the voices that told the truth of despair, and not in
yourself only, but also in Kleist and Beethoven. Year after year you lived on at Weimar
accumulating knowledge and collecting objects, writing letters and gathering them in, as though
in your old age you had found the real way to discover the eternal in the momentary, though you
could only mummify it, and to spiritualise nature though you could only hide it with a pretty
mask. This is why we reproach you with insincerity."
The old bigwig kept his eyes musingly on mine, smiling as before.
Then to my surprise, he asked, "You must have a strong objection, then, to the
Magic Flute
of
Mozart?"
And before I could protest, he went on:
"The
Magic Flute
presents life to us as a wondrous song. It honors our feelings, transient, as
they are, as something eternal and divine. It agrees neither with Herr von Kleist nor with Herr
Beethoven. It preaches optimism and faith."
"I know, I know," I cried in a rage. "God knows why you hit of all things on the
Magic Flute
that is dearer to me than anything else in the world. But Mozart did not live to be eighty-two. He
did not make pretensions in his own life to the enduring and the orderly and to exalted dignity as
you did. He did not think himself so important! He sang his divine melodies and died. He died
young—poor and misunderstood—"
I lost my breath. A thousand things ought to have been said in ten words. My forehead began
to sweat.
Goethe, however, said very amiably: "It may be unforgivable that I lived to be eighty-two. My
satisfaction on that account was, however, less than you may think. You are right that a great
longing for survival possessed me continually. I was in continual fear of death and continually
struggling with it. I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed
determination to live, is the motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
My eighty-two years showed just as conclusively that we must all die in the end as if I had died
as a schoolboy. If it helps to justify me I should like to say this too: my nature had much of the
child in it, its curiosity and love for idleness and play. Well, and so it went on and on, till I saw
that sooner or later there must be enough of play."
As he said this, his smile was quite cunning—a downright roguish leer. He had grown taller
and his erect bearing and the constrained dignity of his face had disappeared. The air, too, around
us was now ringing with melodies, all of them songs of Goethe's. I heard Mozart's "Violets" and
Schubert's "Again thou fillest brake and vale" quite distinctly. And Goethe's face was rosy and
youthful, and he laughed; and now he resembled Mozart like a brother, now Schubert, and the
star on his breast was composed entirely of wild flowers. A yellow primrose blossomed
luxuriantly in the middle of it.
It did not altogether suit me to have the old gentleman avoid my questions and accusations in
this sportive manner, and I looked at him reproachfully. At that he bent forward and brought his
mouth, which had now become quite like a child's, close to my ear and whispered softly into it:
"You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend. You should not take old people
who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be
taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I
don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high
a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is
no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."
And indeed there was no saying another serious word to the man. He capered joyfully and
nimbly up and down and made the primrose shoot out from his star like a rocket and then he
made it shrink and disappear. While he flickered to and fro with his dance steps and figures, it
was borne in upon me that he at least had not neglected learning to dance. He could do it
wonderfully.