|
|
|
|
THE STRESS OF STORMS STORM AND STRESS |
|---|
|
|
|
|
THE STRESS OF STORMS STORM AND STRESS |
|---|
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
(1749-1832)
German playwright, novelist and essay writer born in
Frankfurt in 1749. He died in Weimar in 1832.
Primary promoter of the literary group called “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress). He is the author of an encyclopaedic text and he is considered one of the most important characters of western culture and one of the most complete geniuses that have enriched the universal culture. The image of Goethe has fascinated modern men who have been overwhelmed by an era of specialization.
Goethe was always submerged in impossible love affairs but none of them ever stopped the poet from forging his monumental works. His first dramatic play Götz von Berlichingen (1774), thought to be a manifesto for the German Romanticism, became a complete success with the intellectuals, readers and German theatre spectators. Soon Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) would provoke a storm in the literary groups in all of Europe; also it consolidated the author’s international fame and caused an epidemic of suicides among readers plagued by impossible love affairs.
We will not mention his many works; on the other hand, we will remember that his immortal Faust was written inside his head for over sixty years until it was finished in 1831. However, Goethe ordered that it was not to be published until after his death. In 1832, he died at the age of eighty-three in the house of the Duke of Weimar yelling, “More light!”
***
STORM AND STRESS
“More light! More light!” yelled Johann Wolfgang Goethe from his bed in the house of the Duke of Weimar that noon of March 22nd,1832, as eighty-three years of life filtered in retrospect through his memory.
When young Werther (trustee of all the poet’s love affairs) heard him, he ran to the window. However, when he realized the curtains were completely open, he threw himself on them to rip them off so he could provide his very old creator with more light.
Struggling to unhook the curtains, Werther tangled his weak body in them and brought them down to the floor. There he discovered for his horror that the crimson curtains were hiding the impetus of a live storm: the devilish spirit that for more than sixty years had followed the poet’s fruitful quill.
“Get away from me, you suicidal maniac!,” ordered the terrible Mephistopheles standing over him. He shook Werther off his cape with true contempt and disgust and Werther rolled on the floor.
Mephistopheles floated weightlessly in front of the window. Stretching his arms and legs, he drew with his own body the five points of the feared microcosmic star that plunged the room in darkness.
“Light, light, more light!” yelled again the poet in his agony.
“It is time, doctor,” said Mephistopheles.
Even though he was overwhelmed with fear, young Werther, with the help of his passionate and fragile spirit, intervened and said, “Leave him alone, you demon! That man doesn’t owe you anything.”
“It was an agreement, doctor,” said Mephistopheles, completely ignoring the boy. “You have enjoyed my part of the bargain. I gave you the most marvellous
intelligence of all this century, and with it the ability to gain access to everything that is worth knowing in this world. I now come for what is mine.”
“Charlotte!” screamed Werther calling in one name seven of the most remarkable of Goethe’s lovers and also his inspiration. They filled the death chamber like cherubs.
“It was not a pact!” said the immortal Gretchen. “It was a bet that you have not yet won, you swindler.”
“Yes!” cried Kätchen, the teenage lover. “The rules were established that you could keep his soul if you were able to take away his eagerness to become greater and also you offered him unconditional happiness.”
“Your poisonous tricks have not been able to eliminate his willingness to exceed himself,” said Marianne, the last of the poet’s passions.
“Leisurely life has never been his way…” added Lily, his most troublesome affection.
“And even now, on his last day, this man doesn’t back down from his task of winning over evil,” added the romantic Fredericka.
“Your flattering has never seduced him,” said Christiane, the mother of his children.
“This man never took refuge in unconditional happiness,” added his impossible Charlotte.
Mephistopheles thought carefully about the words the doctor had said the day of the agreement: “If one day I lay in peace on a resting bed, not caring what may become of me; if one day, with flattery, you seduce me in a way that I like it; if I stop and say to a single instant: Stop, you are so beautiful! Then you can chain me down.”
“Light, light, more light!” complained Goethe for the last time and the women’s warm faces surrounded him. As they disappeared, he said to them, “You approach me again as distant images that my troubled eyes saw in older times. Shall I try to hold you this time? Do I feel my soul wanting such madness? You are all together!
Well then, you can emerge from around me and from the fog and from my breath. My chest trembles, young again, with the magical whispers of your love. This moment is beautiful. . .”
At that precise moment Mephistopheles snatched Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s soul and abandoned it in the immortal Olympus.
 |
 |
 |
| ANTERIOR | ÍNDICE | SIGUIENTE |
 |
© Alberto Sibaja Álvarez. San José, Costa Rica
® The Stress of Storms
