The Faustians and the Mouse
The story of Professor Faust has been likened by "Miss Robin" -- in a comment on this blog -- to children of our time, those we've come to call "the Baby Boomers." I vowed when I read her comment that I would try to say something "brilliant" about all that, not altogether sure that I could, you understand, but a bit taken aback that a young lady less than 1/3 the Mouse's age had put a slant on our recent history that -- I confess -- had never so much as crossed the Mouse's mind -- not even as a shadow. And today's blog is it ... the Mouse's "brilliant" expansion on Miss Robin's truly brilliant insight. (Hmm. I first spelled it "incite," and perhaps would never have noticed my "error" had I not heard Herr Doctor Freud laughing his head off in Prichard, Alabama ... the place where the souls of the righteous but unwashed dead were transferred after the Pope abolished Limbo.)
Faust's story has been written a thousand times, but most notably by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German writer, some would say, the German writer . We've had Benet's "The Devil & Daniel Webster," an opera "Faust" by Gounod, a modern novel by Thomas Mann, and at least one dramatization by the lady we know on this blog as "Finding Fairhope." [She named the devil, Nick. Thought I'd forgotten, did you?]
The story's actually quite simple. A man with a problem strikes a bargain with an all-powerful being -- makes a contract, as it were -- and enjoys for a time all the benefits he had traded his soul for. Miss Robin understood that "the Baby Boomers didn't sign any such contract." She claimed they just happened to come along at a time in history when the world was primed to render the benefits. The contract was unconsciously negotiated. They were carried along into the sin of "consumerism" by the favoring gales of fortune. They didn't realize they had sold their souls.
Miss Robin's Faustian allegory is thus, in a profound way, far more devastating than Goethe's. At least Professor Faust had the benefit of an arm's length deal, as they say; he bargained with his eyes wide open. But the Boomers hardly realized that by falling in love with "things" they were sacrificing the only thing that, finally, would make life worth living. They had lost sight of the value of life itself. Having confused life with the all-too-fleeting sensations produced by having this or that object, they imagined -- in their wildest dreams -- that "things" would put an end to boredom. "If I only had a rubber ducky, the girl of my dreams would love me, and I would forget about the Mercedes" ... until tomorrow they should have added.
If Goethe had leapt ahead a century or so and read his Sartre and Camus, he could have had his man Faust moaning about the bassackwardness of the way the Boomers -- and most of us -- consider that the world works. He could have had Faust arguing with his angelic self about the order of the verbs, be, do, and have. Instead, he threw the good Doctor Faust onto the ass end of the triad, had him believing that if Mephistopheles would just let him have great knowledge, then he would do great works, and be the man he had always sensed that he could be. Of course, Goethe knew what he was doing, even if Faust didn't. Goethe was, after all, a good Spinozist! Goethe arranged it, you see, that when the Devil came for his due, Faust's beloved Margarete, so in love with Faust's kisses while the contract terms were in his favor, would now be led to cry:
Are you no longer able to return a kiss?
So short a time away from me. my love,
and you've forgotten how to kiss.
Faust has had his fling with knowledge and sensuous living, he has done all that the wealthiest Prince's of the world might have done, and now he is left where he began, with his own being. He has had his rubber ducky, and has found it wanting.
The world as we know it emerges out of our being, here and now. To the extent that our being drives us to do things out of our being, rather than out of our having, (X) we are become as better beings, able to do mightier works with greater perfection, able to have the power to move on to the higher levels of being to which we are now empowered. It is out of our being that we see and judge goodness and beauty. It is out of our acting as more enlightened and appreciative beings that we are able to do -- with natural ease -- things we might before have judged impossible.
Faust had not seen it that way, though Goethe had. Faust was already a learned man, a powerful man, but somehow came to believe he was being deprived. He thought because he lacked a knowledge of everything, he knew nothing. His rubber ducky -- the power he wished he could wheedle from Mephistopheles -- he already had ... or else there was no such. He had been deluded by visions of a Heaven that he knew, from his learning, was a fiction, but which he nonetheless imagined as something real. Perhaps he suspected, or merely wished, that all allegories had a counterpart in Being, that if he could imagine Heaven it must in some sense be obtainable. If he had simply compared the power he knew he possessed in his own soul to that possessed by, say, a frog, he would have seen the only Heaven there is ... the divine force Dylan Thomas saw, "the power that through the green fuse drives the flower," the elan that drives the human soul.
So, Faust had a problem. But his was not a problem brought about by ignorance. His emptiness became apparent to him only in his fullness. But the Boomers were different. They never sensed fullness, only emptiness. They set about with a frenzy to fill it with whatever seemed to momentarily relieve the dullness created by the safety and sameness of the world as it seemed to be in the sitcoms of the 50s and 60s. But that emptiness is like the hole in the barn roof Twain's jaybird kept putting acorns in, the one he never filled, and never could. If the jay had been capable of reflecting on life's rewards , as Spinoza was, and as Goethe parodied in Faust, he may have reflected as the philosopher did in the first paragraph of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, probably the most poetic, and certainly one the most fundamental passages in his prose:
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
Spinoza found his happiness in exactly the place where Faust had found his sorrow, in a true knowledge of the world and, thus, of God. The Boomers, though, became bogged down in the "vain and futile" trappings of the "usual surroundings of social life." They never made it out of their senses into a discovery of their mind. Small wonder that their pleasures have not delivered "continuous, supreme, and unending happiness." They were -- and remain -- in love with the wrong sorts of objects.
Perhaps in time, after the vanities have run their course, a critical mass of humankind will awaken to the greatness and glory of simply being human, learning to revel in what they are instead of in what they might someday have. That'll be Heaven
Faust's story has been written a thousand times, but most notably by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German writer, some would say, the German writer . We've had Benet's "The Devil & Daniel Webster," an opera "Faust" by Gounod, a modern novel by Thomas Mann, and at least one dramatization by the lady we know on this blog as "Finding Fairhope." [She named the devil, Nick. Thought I'd forgotten, did you?]
The story's actually quite simple. A man with a problem strikes a bargain with an all-powerful being -- makes a contract, as it were -- and enjoys for a time all the benefits he had traded his soul for. Miss Robin understood that "the Baby Boomers didn't sign any such contract." She claimed they just happened to come along at a time in history when the world was primed to render the benefits. The contract was unconsciously negotiated. They were carried along into the sin of "consumerism" by the favoring gales of fortune. They didn't realize they had sold their souls.
Miss Robin's Faustian allegory is thus, in a profound way, far more devastating than Goethe's. At least Professor Faust had the benefit of an arm's length deal, as they say; he bargained with his eyes wide open. But the Boomers hardly realized that by falling in love with "things" they were sacrificing the only thing that, finally, would make life worth living. They had lost sight of the value of life itself. Having confused life with the all-too-fleeting sensations produced by having this or that object, they imagined -- in their wildest dreams -- that "things" would put an end to boredom. "If I only had a rubber ducky, the girl of my dreams would love me, and I would forget about the Mercedes" ... until tomorrow they should have added.
If Goethe had leapt ahead a century or so and read his Sartre and Camus, he could have had his man Faust moaning about the bassackwardness of the way the Boomers -- and most of us -- consider that the world works. He could have had Faust arguing with his angelic self about the order of the verbs, be, do, and have. Instead, he threw the good Doctor Faust onto the ass end of the triad, had him believing that if Mephistopheles would just let him have great knowledge, then he would do great works, and be the man he had always sensed that he could be. Of course, Goethe knew what he was doing, even if Faust didn't. Goethe was, after all, a good Spinozist! Goethe arranged it, you see, that when the Devil came for his due, Faust's beloved Margarete, so in love with Faust's kisses while the contract terms were in his favor, would now be led to cry:
Are you no longer able to return a kiss?
So short a time away from me. my love,
and you've forgotten how to kiss.
Faust has had his fling with knowledge and sensuous living, he has done all that the wealthiest Prince's of the world might have done, and now he is left where he began, with his own being. He has had his rubber ducky, and has found it wanting.
The world as we know it emerges out of our being, here and now. To the extent that our being drives us to do things out of our being, rather than out of our having, (X) we are become as better beings, able to do mightier works with greater perfection, able to have the power to move on to the higher levels of being to which we are now empowered. It is out of our being that we see and judge goodness and beauty. It is out of our acting as more enlightened and appreciative beings that we are able to do -- with natural ease -- things we might before have judged impossible.
Faust had not seen it that way, though Goethe had. Faust was already a learned man, a powerful man, but somehow came to believe he was being deprived. He thought because he lacked a knowledge of everything, he knew nothing. His rubber ducky -- the power he wished he could wheedle from Mephistopheles -- he already had ... or else there was no such. He had been deluded by visions of a Heaven that he knew, from his learning, was a fiction, but which he nonetheless imagined as something real. Perhaps he suspected, or merely wished, that all allegories had a counterpart in Being, that if he could imagine Heaven it must in some sense be obtainable. If he had simply compared the power he knew he possessed in his own soul to that possessed by, say, a frog, he would have seen the only Heaven there is ... the divine force Dylan Thomas saw, "the power that through the green fuse drives the flower," the elan that drives the human soul.
So, Faust had a problem. But his was not a problem brought about by ignorance. His emptiness became apparent to him only in his fullness. But the Boomers were different. They never sensed fullness, only emptiness. They set about with a frenzy to fill it with whatever seemed to momentarily relieve the dullness created by the safety and sameness of the world as it seemed to be in the sitcoms of the 50s and 60s. But that emptiness is like the hole in the barn roof Twain's jaybird kept putting acorns in, the one he never filled, and never could. If the jay had been capable of reflecting on life's rewards , as Spinoza was, and as Goethe parodied in Faust, he may have reflected as the philosopher did in the first paragraph of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, probably the most poetic, and certainly one the most fundamental passages in his prose:
After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
Spinoza found his happiness in exactly the place where Faust had found his sorrow, in a true knowledge of the world and, thus, of God. The Boomers, though, became bogged down in the "vain and futile" trappings of the "usual surroundings of social life." They never made it out of their senses into a discovery of their mind. Small wonder that their pleasures have not delivered "continuous, supreme, and unending happiness." They were -- and remain -- in love with the wrong sorts of objects.
Perhaps in time, after the vanities have run their course, a critical mass of humankind will awaken to the greatness and glory of simply being human, learning to revel in what they are instead of in what they might someday have. That'll be Heaven
posted by Benedict S. at 8:23 PM
8 Comments:
The soul-selling of America began long ago and simply has not been halted yet. We can't lay everything on the 1960's, or on the current occupant of the White House, or any one specific person, place or thing.
Mankind has been complicit in its own undoing for centuries -- you might even say it's the human condition.
And you reread Faust in only one night? WOW! What a wonderful blog mouse, it's written almost like an opus, your descrition of Faust is so muted and suave, I was enthralled, like taking a bath in warm milk.
Is there any one generation that is innocent?
I've never taken a bath in warm milk, so I wouldn't know. (Irony lessons from Justin Kahn)
Warm milk is sticky and afterward you smell...
and besides that, at 3.29 a gallon it seems a waste of money!
Yeah, that milk idea sounds bad ... but if we maybe think the lady had in mind not actually taking the bath, simply imagining the feel of it, it doesn't sound all that bad then. Cheap too.
Hey. I don't get that many compliments that I can go sniffing their arm pits.
Robin: I didn't read the whole thing. Just every fifth word. You lose a little of the meter that way but almost nothing of the meaning.
My crazy brother claimed he read War and Peace twice, not by actually turning the pages twice, but by reading every word twice while on the way thru. So, I just improved on his method.
[But bear in mind, chile ... I am a Mark Twain impersonator and of that old boy it has been accurately reported, that he never left a humorous lie untold.]
Geeze you people, I'm surprised at you Miss FF, hasn't anyone ever seen the milk and honey bubble bath that Wal-Mart sells? And for your information Mr.Mouse my armpits doesn't smell.
Let us not speak of armpits and warm milk in the same blogpost, puh-leeze. I am tiring of this love fest and overpraising for such unremarkable things as speed reading and getting good grades (or not). Let's move onto things we can understand like souls in torment or dandies in aspic or shoes and ships and sealing wax. Or Spinoza spinning. Or Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate. Maybe I'll deal with such as I'm finding the real Fairhope. Roger-Willco-over-and-out!
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