Home

Was Goethe so solidly constituted that he never later regretted saying no to Christian August, Prince of Waldeck, at his invitation to jouney to Greece, and beyond?to Greece, Dalmatia, and beyond?

So few would admirably pass an intellectual final exam, that it would seem to be inhumane, by God, for that to be the criterion of judgment.

Considering growing to recognize sic transit gloria – and foolishness, genius, striving, indifference, politics!, nobility, ignobility, intelligentsia, mediocrity, translatio imperii et studii,…– mundi as the living reality, I myself can only hope to being writing a biography in the sky.

In a word: Bildungserlebnisexam

HDT sought sanity from society and “politics” in Nature, I in History.

Just read a description in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), in which he describes the social psychology he experienced and observed around him in late summer 1914. It is the same emotional, irrational psychology I observed in 2014 in Moscow regarding Ukraine, and have observed the past years in the US in regards to the most unfit President in US history.

All the many Russians who are trying to ignore the war in Ukraine with their once-fellow Slavs, or who are allowing themselves to be duped by state propaganda, are much the same as those Germans in the 30s and 40s who did not want to know what their government was doing to the Jews.

One aspect of why disinterest and ignorance in and of history limits personal and social growth is because studying the history of an other time and people is little less than seeing your self and your society in a mirror – be that mirror cracked, with askew pieces and missing pieces, smudges…. it still would allow self- and social-knowledge.

But then… One was wish to wake up.

“Streams of consciousness” (James)… or perhaps streams of society in which people are more or less conscious of themselves.

It seems less that churches’ sermons and services are answers to more than less conscious, actual, experienced questions of life, beng and meaning, than that they are just the “relgious” part of the dreamy, unconscious, shared inherited life- and mind-style.

How many move around the main elements of human history with too much levity.