Without Lifting A Finger

I've moved on but here's one more fantastic "clip" on Holderlin. * This distinction between text and variant came to prove so contentious among Hölderlin scholars that in 1975 a rival and yet to be completed edition, the so-called Frankfurt Edition, was inaugurated on the principle that there can be no core Hölderlinian text, that we must learn to read the manuscripts as palimpsests of versions overlaying and underlying other versions. For the foreseeable future the notion of a definitive text of Hölderlin is thus in suspension. One reason for this contest of editions is that, in the ninety-two-page notebook that lies at the heart of the problem, Hölderlin went back and forth between new and old manuscript poems, using different pens and inks in an unsystematic way, dating nothing, allowing what one might at firs t glance call different versions of the same poem to stand side by side. A deeper reason is that in his last productive years Hölderlin seems to have...

Interrupting Flaubert & Sand and entertaining Coetzee. A friend sent me a sample: Beckett, the White Whale (White Wall), Kafka. How could I refuse? Anyway, these "clips" are from an essay on Holderlin, which may prompt (imminently) yet another rereading. * There is no doubting Hölderlin’s revolutionary sympathies – ‘Pray for the French, the champions of human rights,’ he instructed his younger sister – but his poems say nothing direct about politics. To a degree this was because he had no models for political poetry; but it was also because of a strong tradition among Germany’s intellectual class of not involving itself in politics. The writer with the strongest following among young idealists was Schiller, and Schiller’s political line after 1793 was that the consciousness of the people needed to evolve before true political change could take effect. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794–5 Schiller argued that the human spirit could best be ...

End of a semester (feels like I was punched in one lung)  Reading: Finished Holderlin's letters (wanted to linger there; will save the essays for another day); Agnes Nemes Nagy's  The Night of  Akhenaton (told to read her long ago); Cervante's Don Quixote (it's been on my to-read list for some while) I think I'll go for a walk

Just a few bullets: there is nothing more than these four walls Everything is interconnected, and suffers as soon as it is active, including the purest thought a human being can have Kant is the Moses of our nation, leading it out of Egyptian lethargy into the open But the scribes and Pharisees of our time, who have made out of the dear holy Bible a cold prattle that kills heart and spirit, I certainly don't want them as witnesses of my intense, living faith Every day I have to invoke the absent god again like a poor glimmering lamp that would dearly beg a drop of oil to shine into the night a bit longer

At least in his early years Holderlin is making a living as a tutor. I believe (I've not read a full biography, so I'm garnering it from his letters): a live-in tutor. Thus some fragmentary thoughts on education (at least in this letter he is interacting with Rousseau pretty much throughout): I must waken his humanity But Rousseau is wrong in patiently waiting for humanity to awaken in the child But I would never ask the child whether he had remembered what had been said, for the point is not history itself but its influence on the heart So long as geography is not, as it usually is, reduced to something dead and papery; so long as the maps are enlivened with suitably adapted travel accounts If the child can come to notice day by day that arithmetic is part and parcel of many useful activities he will very likely take pleasure in doing it To teach a child a language systematically will be very difficult if it is to occur before the child is even capable of working towa...

Combing through Holderlin's Hymns and Fragments , translated by Richard Sieburth. I had underlined (2005) a passage (the ending) from "The Eagle": What you possess Is taking breath. What you raise By day, rediscover In sleep. Where eyes are covered And feet are bound, You will find it. Und was einer hat, ist Athem zu hohlen. Hat einer ihn nemlich hinauf Am Tage gebracht, Er findet im Schlaf ihn wieder. Denn wo die Augen zugedekt, Und gebunden die  F üß e sin d, Da wirst du es finden.

Started them a couple days ago via Kindle. Below I bullet just a few underscores: I went home moved, and thanked God that I could feel where thousands rush by indifferently, either because they are accustomed to the sight or because they have hearts like lard the desire to learn can consume all other desires But don't we most doubt precisely what we desire ? The wisdom of my 21 years very often deserts me The reason I'm still in the seminary is that my mother wishes it. I suppose I can waste a year or two for her sake Send me some of your poems soon. There is more in them for our souls than in letters. Isn't that true? And a good cause can always hope for God's protection pray for the French, the champions of the rights of man The magical light I saw it in when I had finished it, & even more when I read it to you on that unforgettable afternoon, has now dissipated so entirely that only the hope of soon writing a better poem can offer me some consolation f...

By the time we got through customs and got the rental car we had very little time to "investigate" between Stuttgart Airport and Zurich (our first big pitstop). The only mini-stop we made (other than a gas station near the German-Swiss border to buy the Swiss autobahn sticker) was Tubingen, and most of our Tubingen energy was spent in getting to and from Holderlin's Tower along the Neckar. Holderlin's Tower along the Neckar Holderlin Plaque  Holderlin Graffiti at the Museum Door

Tübingen_009 , a photo by Rob124 on Flickr. A friend has convinced me Tubingen is a must-see. I most certainly want to see Holderlin's Tower. We'll drive from Stuttgart down to Zurich (stopping at a few other must-sees on the way). Time will tell.