"The Blue Flower"

[fiefoe]

I can't get a handle on Fritz, but all his siblings leap off the page to me. And of course the Mandelsloh! The beginning was almost comical.

• the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.’ ‘They are as usual. I did not buy this furniture myself, but—’ Fritz tried to explain that he had seen not their everyday, but their spiritual selves. He could not tell when these transfigurations would come to him. When the moment came it was as the whole world would be when body at last became subservient to soul.
• the work of the forewinter—sausage-making, beating flax for the winter spinning, killing the geese (who had already been plucked alive twice) for their third and last crop of down.
• Fritz also told her that women are children of nature, so that nature, in a sense, is their art. ‘Karoline, you must read Wilhelm Meister.’
• Friedrich Schlegel lived with a woman ten years older than himself. She was Dorothea, daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn,
• They were all intelligent, all revolutionaries, but since each of them had a different plan, none of it would come to anything.
• The civilised world could not exist without its multitude of copying clerks, and they in turn could not exist if civilisation did not involve so many pieces of paper.’
• we are like two watches set to the same time, and when we see one another again there has been no interval—we still strike together.’
• Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Language speaks, because speaking is its pleasure and it can do nothing else.’
• far behind us Roars youth’s wild ocean. Some day, in the noon-tide of life, we shall both sit at table,
• ‘Miracles don’t make people believe!’ Fritz cried. ‘It’s the belief that is the miracle.’
• when we hear certain words, when we read certain passages, thoughts take on the meaning of laws . . . a view of life true to itself, without any selfestrangement. And the self is set free, for the moment, from the constant pressure of change.
• Organic form is innate: it unfolds itself from within, and acquires its determination at the same time as the perfect development of the germ.”
• vagrants, old soldiers, travelling theatrical companies, pedlars—all these silted up on the frontier like floating rubbish on a river’s banks.
• ‘I think, indeed, that women have a better grasp on the whole business of life than we men have. We are morally better than they are, but they can reach perfection, we can’t. And that is in spite of the fact that they particularise, we generalise.’
• Every man, Rockenthien thought, deserved such a presence in his house. The Mandelsloh would check over the wines in the cellar, do his accounts, drown the kittens, keep an eye, if necessary, on Söphgen.
• ‘I shall read my introduction aloud, and you must tell me what it means.’ Sophie evidently felt weighed down by this responsibility. ‘Do you not know yourself?’ she asked doubtfully.
• It is dangerous—on this, at least, all Germany’s physicians were agreed—not to keep the stomach full at all times.
• Frau Rockenthien said peaceably that when she was young, sea air had been thought very unhealthy, but she was not quite sure what doctors said about it nowadays.
• The brass buttons on the tails of his jacket rang against the stones, and a moment later his head struck them grossly, like an unwanted parcel.
• ‘The artist’s feeling justifies him,’ said Fritz. ‘That must always be true, for art and nature follow the same laws.’
• in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether it is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a different question for every entity, which for the most part will never be put into words, even by those who can speak. / ‘I could not hear her question, and so I could not paint.’
• It was by now the very late afternoon, pale blue above clear yellow, with the burning clarity of the northern skies, growing more and more transparent, as though to end in revelation.