Significant Moments: Part 6

As for myself . . .
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew.
Once my written ruminations had served the purpose of making . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, Trauma and Reintegration.
. . . my memory of the past . . .
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy.
. . . more comprehensible to me, the question would arise whither to commit these thoughts—to the wastebasket, which was the final resting place for most of them? This happened because what I had arrived at, although useful to me, seemed of little interest to other people.
Bruno Bettelheim, Trauma and Reintegration.
I should have exulted in my aloneness and taken heart from Ibsen's signature line in An Enemy of the People—"He is strongest who is most alone." But the Jew in me shied from private salvation as something close to sin. One's truth must add its push to the evolution of public justice and mercy, must transform the spirit of the city whose brainless roar went on and on at both ends of the bridge.
Arthur Miller, Timebends.
That was the incessant fight within himself, his own personal drama.
Halvdan Koht, Shakespeare and Ibsen.
If I did speak out, I thought, I must do so where it would count and not be brushed aside like yesterday's paper.
Arthur Miller, Timebends.
That much I knew. But beyond that, I was at a loss. How was I to proceed?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
The attitude adopted by reviewers in the scientific periodicals could only lead one to suppose that my work was doomed to be sunk into complete silence;
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . but given . . .
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native.
. . . my reasons for wanting to see the essay printed, I could not give up, and eventually it was published.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
But for some time The Interpretation of Dreams proved of little interest: in the course of six years, only 351 copies were sold, and a second edition was not called for until 1909. If, as Freud came to believe, it was indeed his fate to agitate the sleep of mankind, that would be years later. It is sobering to contrast this tepid, yawning reception with that of another revolutionary classic shaping modern culture, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Published on November 24, 1859, forty years almost to the day before Freud's dream book, its entire first edition of 1,250 copies was sold out by evening, and new, revised editions followed rapidly. While Darwin's book was subversive, it stood at the storm center of a great debate about the nature of the human animal and had been eagerly awaited. Freud's book, which proved no less subversive, at first only seemed esoteric and eccentric, food for a handful of specialists.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
As far as I personally am concerned, I am always conscious of continually advancing . . .
Henrik Ibsen, Letter to Georg Brandes.
. . . rightly proud of not having followed "the compact majority . . . "
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
The points I had reached when I wrote my various books now have a fairly compact crowd standing there. But I am no longer there myself; I am somewhere else, further on, I hope.
Henrik Ibsen, Letter to Georg Brandes.
From the beginning, writing meant freedom, a spreading of wings, and once I got the first inkling that others were reached by what I wrote, an assumption arose that some kind of public business was happening inside me, that what perplexed or moved me must move others. It was a sort of blessing I invented for myself. Of course the time would come, as it had to, when the blessing seemed to have been withdrawn from me, but that was far down the road.
Arthur Miller, Timebends.
His song was one that the father would surely not have recognized and would perhaps have found discordant. Yet somehow, in the balance, I feel he would not have been displeased, . . .
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
. . . for, unlike . . .
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
. . . his father who picked up his cap and walked on, Freud does become, in the triumph of his intellectual achievement, the Hannibal of his fantasy.
J. Moussaieff Masson and Terri C. Masson, Buried Memories on the Acropolis: Freud's Response to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism.
Freud's resolution of the guilt he felt . . .
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
. . . following the death of his father . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . was a psychological victory.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
Perhaps the truth is that he is at last himself, no longer afflicted by mourning and melancholia. . . . Certainly he is no longer haunted by his father's ghost.
Harold Bloom, William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
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Literature, it has often been claimed over the past quarter century, is neither a stable nor a coherent entity. One way you can tell is by the shifting nature of the literary canon. As cultural fashions change and new values come to the fore, writers once deemed peripheral or uncanonical are brought into the canon, others once thought central being displaced to the margins. More drastically, books that were not originally imagined to belong to the category of literature, . . .
Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age.
. . . Charles Darwin's Origin of Species . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, are read into the canon and discussed in the same breath—or in the same course—with novels and poems.
Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age.
The Canon, a word religious in its origins, has become a choice among texts struggling with one another for survival, whether you interpret the choice as being made by dominant social groups, institutions of education, traditions of criticism, or, as I do, by late-coming authors who feel themselves chosen by particular ancestral figures. Some recent partisans of what regards itself as academic radicalism go so far as to suggest that works join the Canon because of successful advertising and propaganda campaigns.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.
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. . . with every generation, someone is chosen. There is Ishmael, firstborn of Abraham, and his brother Isaac. And then there's Isaac's children, Jacob and Esau.
Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation.
Then the twelve brothers, Jacob’s sons.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . with Joseph as the favorite.
Bill Moyers, Genesis: A Living Conversation.
Of his twelve sons he loved Joseph best because—like Sigmund Freud—he was the fruit of his father's old age.
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
My father was an interesting person with an analytic, highly philosophic mind. . . .
He was well over forty when I was born.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
The large patriarchal family was united by strong bonds of affection and governed by a traditional hierarchy.
Billa Zanuso, The Young Freud.
Jacob was obviously anxious to hand down to his son those parts of the Jewish religion that seemed particularly important to him.
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
The boy grew up in . . .
E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey.
. . . . a “religious but strongly assimilated milieu.” For a year or so, when he was about eight or nine . . .
Current Biography: Abraham Pais.
. . . he embraced . . .
George Eliot, Brother Jacob.
. . . his religion wholeheartedly, only to lose his faith abruptly when, knowing that it was strictly forbidden to make a fire on the Sabbath, he secretly lit a match one Saturday afternoon and discerned no evidence of divine retribution.
Current Biography: Abraham Pais.
A frantic desire took hold of me. I had to find out if He really existed, if He knew my doubts—yes, I must risk that, even if it cost me my life. And the little boy I was, sitting upright in my bed, holding my breath in mortal fear, . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . I lit a match, and as I did so, . . .
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
. . . thought these horrible words: God is a fool! I expected his immediate appearance, a deadly blow, or at least thunder, but nothing materialized.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
“I still feel it to be a privilege to have gone through my liberation as a personal act,”
Current Biography: Abraham Pais.
. . . he said, years later, when speaking of his boyhood
John Kendrick Bangs, Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica.
I had to attend a school of the Reformed Jewish synagogue to learn some Hebrew, in to order to be prepared for my bar mitzvah, and I found this an unexpected moral attack on me, hard to reconcile with my past and present religious background.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
In Hebrew school, I was taught to read without learning the meaning of the words. Services, too, often seemed mechanical and by rote.
David Evanier, My Rabbi, Ray Charles, and Singing Birds.
Once and for all these . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Charlotte von Stein, from Rome (June 8, 1787).
. . . religious . . .
Leon Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
. . . ceremonies are lost on me, . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Charlotte von Stein, from Rome (June 8, 1787).
. . . they have always been . . .
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit.
. . . lost on me, all these efforts to give substance to a lie strike me as shallow, and the goings-on that are impressive to children and susceptible people seem to me, even when I see things from the standpoint of an artist or poet, to be tasteless and petty. No thing is great but what is true, and even the smallest true . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Charlotte von Stein, from Rome (June 8, 1787).
. . . thing . . .
Leon Lederman, The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
. . . is great.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letter to Charlotte von Stein, from Rome (June 8, 1787).
My parents, and especially my father, were never Orthodox Jews. My mother liked to go to temple simply in order to be seen. Only the sabbath was upheld, more a pretext, . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . I am inclined to think, . . .
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
. . . to bring the family together on Friday nights for a happy reunion.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
In truth, until precisely those months it had not meant much to me that I was a Jew: within myself, and in my contacts with my Christian friends, I had always considered my origin as an almost negligible but curious fact, a small amusing anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles; a Jew is somebody who at Christmas does not have a tree, who should not eat salami but eats it all the same, who has learned a bit of Hebrew at thirteen and then has forgotten it.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
Some weeks before . . .
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
. . . the great day arrived . . .
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.
. . . the rabbi . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . called me once and said he wanted a . . .
David Evanier, My Rabbi, Ray Charles, and Singing Birds.
. . . meeting with me.
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders.
“Now,” he said . . .
Deborah Artman, Talking Points.
. . . when he saw me again . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain.
. . . “let’s get down to business.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out . . .
Deborah Artman, Talking Points.
. . . a copy of My . . .
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.
. . . bar mitzvah . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . oration.
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.
“How dare you give me this,” he growled. “This isn’t you!”
“What?” I managed to whisper. “But I used references.”
“You strung together quotes from books,” he said. “I will give you a month. Rewrite it.”

It was my terrible secret. I couldn’t tell . . .
Deborah Artman, Talking Points.
. . . my mother . . .
Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.
. . . that I had to start again.
Deborah Artman, Talking Points.
But I can tell you now—
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage.
. . . my readers, . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Many Years.
I took a lot of trouble with that speech. I rewrote it five times and I look upon it as my masterpiece.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
When the great day arrived . . .
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables.
. . . the day of my bar mitzvah, . . .
Mara Dresner, A League of His Own.
—and, of course, . . .
Stephen Greenblatt, Miracles.
. . . it was a Saturday: I was still under parental discipline: it is forbidden to ride on a Saturday until Sabbath has ‘gone out’:
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
—God forbid!—
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
So I decided to walk. But I underestimated the time it would take me . . .
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
(putting it mildly)
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
. . . and arrived very late.
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
I dashed . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . into the Temple . . .
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
. . . gasping for breath . . .
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
There was a moment of general consternation;
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
I felt ashamed and tried to hurry, and at this point . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . my heart beating with terror, . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
I collapsed into my chair.
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
I was seated alone . . .
David Evanier, My Rabbi, Ray Charles and Singing Birds.
virtually alone
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
—and then:
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
As is the custom . . .
Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
I was . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . given a long white shawl with a fringe to wear, told to keep my hat on, and to watch for the moment when the rabbi, who was praying at the altar, would call me. My turn came, and I was led to a table on the platform, where the rabbi, accompanied by his assistants, addressed me with some phrases in Hebrew, whereupon he unrolled the sacred scroll and indicated a few lines of the Bible I was to read. I acquitted myself quite well.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
I remember the hard knowing tone I used . . .
Deborah Artman, Talking Points.
. . . in my oration . . .
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar.
. . . before the congregation
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers.
I was surprised I even had it in me.
Deborah Artman, Talking Points.
But, of course, that’s . . .
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd.
. . . what we . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . we, the searchers, . . .
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.
. . . the freethinkers . . .
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian.
. . . bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.
Don Delillo, The Names.
After a few more exchanges in Hebrew between the rabbi and others, the ceremony was over.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
Father . . .
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
. . . was quiet as usual, never showing any emotion;
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . I knew my father’s own views on such ceremonies.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
Standing up . . .
Kate Zernike, Gratitude And a Sigh From Father Of Israeli.
. . . father . . .
Jack London, The Valley of the Moon.
. . . opened his mouth as if to begin speaking. Instead, he sighed.
Kate Zernike, Gratitude And a Sigh From Father Of Israeli.
Always discreet, . . .
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
. . . my mother . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . said nothing. But she was very pleased.
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
But some other members of the family were not sympathetic to . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . my antics . . .
Carol Cott Gross, Virtual ‘Mazel Tovs’.
. . . and thought we should be disgraced in the eyes of . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . the congregation.
David Evanier, My Rabbi, Ray Charles and Singing Birds.
All I could get out of . . .
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler.
Lewinsky . . . the rabbi
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945.
. . . was that . . .
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler.
. . . some of the elders . . .
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger.
. . . thought . . .
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler.
. . . my unfortunate entrance . . .
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.
. . . a practical joke;
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler.
. . . that I . . .
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit.
. . . was trying to mystify them!
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler.
I received the traditional presents. My mother gave me the tephillin, to be used, presumably, when I would say my daily prayers.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
Not that I did.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
As it happened . . .
E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
In time, . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . I must confess, I . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . discarded virtually all religious observances . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors."
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table.
Being ambitious, he worked hard to . . .
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
. . . do what . . .
William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona.
. . . his own father had expected of him, namely, to fulfill his wish to accomplish great things in life and give reality to a tradition of expected fame.
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
He is a born politician, immensely adroit at getting his way through every means available. His father, Jacob, is always too hard-pressed to be thought a politician; agonists get their way only through struggle, overt or covert, whether by force or by trickery.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
[He] himself once described his father in "rather Micawber-like terms as 'always hopefully expecting something to turn up.'"
Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers.
Jacob strives to achieve and keep the Blessing; he is precisely not a charismatic personality, though he makes himself into a very formidable personality indeed. Everything comes easily to Joseph, who will emerge from every catastrophe more suave and unflustered than ever. Jacob, despite his success, is an unlucky man; Joseph's luck is constant, reliable, and charmingly outrageous.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
Throughout his life Freud struggled with his father's mandate . . .
Marianne Kròll, Freud and His Father.
. . . to possess a famous, triumphant son.
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
Sigmund, for his part, must have realized that his father wanted him to be a second Joseph: upright, clever, the support of his father in old age, and—I would add—a son who did not enquire into his father's past, let alone reproach him for it.
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
Freud's obsession with the desire to make a discovery of universal significance . . .
Billa Zanuso, The Young Freud.
. . . to present to his father the gift of fame and distinction as expected of him . . .
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
. . . had consequences which proved damaging to his career.
Billa Zanuso, The Young Freud.
On the evening of April 21, 1896, Sigmund Freud gave a paper before his colleagues at the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, entitled "The Aetiology of Hysteria."
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
This is the place where I shall start my great career, I daydreamed.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
He took . . .
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
. . . the paper . . .
David Evanier, The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards.
. . . out of his pocket, opened it, glanced at it, looked surprised and worried, and stood silent for a few moments. Then he waved his hand in a wandering and mechanical way, and made an effort or two to say something, then gave it up, despondently. Several voices cried out:
"Read it! read it! What is it?"
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
His listeners were all experts on the twisted byways of erotic life. The great Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who had made sexual psychopathology his own, was presiding. Freud's lecture was a lively, highly skillful forensic performance. The student of hysteria, he said, is like an explorer discovering the remains of an abandoned city, with walls and columns and tablets covered with half-effaced inscriptions, he may dig them up and clean them, and then with luck the stones speak—saxa loquuntur. He expended all this rhetorical effort to persuade his incredulous listeners that they must seek the origin of hysteria in the sexual abuse of children. All eighteen cases he had treated, Freud noted, invited this conclusion. But his mixture of colorful eloquence and scientific sobriety was wasted.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time.
A dozen men got up now and began to protest.
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
The twelve men spake, and said . . .
Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews.
. . . that this farce was the work of some abandoned joker, and was an insult to the whole community.
Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
I felt as if I were going to the scaffold.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
Afterwards they stood about in groups chattering. I heard some say: ‘It starts just as if he were out to play a carnival joke on the public.’ Others were disappointed that there had not been more hissing.
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler.
The seduction theory in all its uncompromising sweep seems inherently implausible, only a fantasist like Fliess could have accepted and applauded it.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time.
The whole thing was a bitter experience for me.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
All his grandiose visions of future glory fell away.
Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis.
How different was this state of affairs from Freud’s initial hopes!
Gary N. Goldsmith, Freud’s Aesthetic Response to Michelangelo’s Moses.
I have had to demolish all my castles in the air, and I am just now mastering enough courage to start rebuilding them again.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
So be it!
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
The lecture, he told Fliess a few days later, "had an icy reception from the donkeys and, on Krafft-Ebing's part, the odd judgment: 'It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.' And this," Freud exclaimed, "after one has shown them the solution of a thousands-years-old problem, a source of the Nile!"
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time.
One thing I know for certain as I think back on that night: nothing, in later years, had such an impact on my character.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
What is astonishing is not that Freud eventually abandoned the idea, but that he adopted it in the first place.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time.
It would take a good psychoanalyst to decipher my own state of mind.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
What Freud repudiated was the seduction theory as a general explanation of how all neuroses originate. This renunciation opened a new chapter in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time.
. . . totally and refreshingly free of what Nietzsche called the spirit of revenge . . .
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
. . . claimed to be anything but "upset, confused, weary," and wondered prophetically "whether this doubt merely represents an episode in the advance toward further discoveries?"
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time.
I felt neither resentment nor hatred.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
He is a dreamer and an interpreter of dreams, which means, however paradoxically, that he is a pragmatist and a compromiser with reality.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
. . . an important page of my life had turned!
Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years.
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It seems to me highly probable that, as a child, Freud identified with the Biblical Joseph to such an extent that that identification took on a reality feeling, along the lines of "I am the Biblical Joseph, destined to be a famous dream interpreter and to come to high honors."
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
In 1891, on Freud's thirty-fifth birthday, his father presented him with an unusual gift. He had rebound in leather the Philippsohn Bible that Sigmund had studied in his childhood and now gave it to him with an elaborate Hebrew inscription that he had composed.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
My precious son—
Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study quoting Joseph Ruggles Wilson, Letter to Woodrow Wilson.
Mein Lieber Sohn,
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Sandor Ferenczi.
In the seventh in the days of the years of your life the Spirit of the Lord began to move you and spoke within you: Go, read in my Book that I have written and there will be burst open for you the wellsprings of understanding, knowledge and wisdom.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses, quoting Jakob Freud’s dedication of the Freud Family Bible, written in Melitzah.
And Israel said . . .
Genesis.
. . . to his son . . .
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham.
'Behold . . .
Genesis.
. . . I fear I shall soon . . .
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
. . . be gathered to Abraham's bosom . . .
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock.
. . . but God will be with you, and . . .
Genesis.
. . . will bless you and make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
Genesis. A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories by Stephen Mitchell.
. . . Moreover I have given thee one portion above thy brethren. . . .'
Genesis.
The Philipsson Bible, with text in Hebrew and German, had been read with interest and fascination by Freud as a young boy. . . . It was profusely illustrated with pictures of the Egyptian gods. Among them, the falcon-headed Horus appears a number of times.
Edmund Engelman, Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938.
The Hebrew inscription . . .
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
. . . that his father wrote . . .
Patricia Wynn Brown, Remembering the Holocaust. Review of Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945.
. . . is central because of its content and doubly precious for having been written in melitzah. . . . Because of his background, the texts from which he drew he knew intimately, by heart. He was drawing freely from this memory, and each phrase had associations to the original from which it was drawn.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
Joseph is Israel's favorite, where "Israel" names both Jacob and the nation that will continue his seed.
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
Later in life, we are told, Jakob in his leisure time would often study the Bible or even a page of Talmud "in the original."
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
I can remember . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . the Passover celebrations, . . .
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries (Tuesday, June 27, 1882).
Pessach.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
My father . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . before his memory began to fail . . .
Interlinkbooks, Review of John MacPherson, Tales from Barra.
. . . would impressively recite the entire text of the Passover Haggadah by heart at the annual Seder.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
But then in later years, . . .
Lavanam, Gandhi’s Revolutionary Personality.
Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . right to left, . . .
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.
. . . with his finger to me.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
Jakob Freud was a loving, devoted, warmhearted father who openly acknowledged his son's precocious brilliance ("My Sigmund has more intelligence in his little toe than I have in my whole head"). Of course he also expected obedience and respect (we are still in the mid-nineteenth century), but he encouraged his son to surpass him and was proud of his achievements.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud's Moses.
When he tells his dreams, the chosen son intensifies his brothers' rivalry. Even the verb describing their continued hatred resonates with Joseph's name; in this way, too, Joseph continued (va-yosif) the tradition of his father's sibling rivalry.
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
Freud's feelings toward . . .
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
. . . his followers, . . .
Bret Harte, The Three Partners.
. . . whom he treated like sons, were a repetition of his relationship with his father, albeit with a reversal of roles: he put himself in Jacob's shoes and made the same demands on his "sons" as his father had made on him.
Marianne Krull, Freud and His Father.
In his eulogy for Karl Abraham, . . .
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . one of his most ardent disciples . . .
Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game.
. . . Freud wrote, "So high a place had he won for himself that, of all who have followed me through the dark pathways of psychoanalytic research, there is only one whose name could be put beside his." Freud's willingness to stir up sibling rivalry at a funeral is noteworthy.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
It was, and is still, a puzzling gesture.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
It is as though Freud walked intuitively and unconsciously in the footsteps of his ancestors and . . .
Hanns Sachs, Freud, Master and Friend.
. . . in the exigency of his longing, may have been moved to free himself from . . .
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
. . . his brethren . . .
Eben Moglen, Holmes’ Legacy and the New Constitutional History.
. . . and take over the father's part.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
Jacob mysteriously but deliberately provokes the issue of . . .
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
. . . survival in . . .
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
. . . his prophetic vision . . .
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Letter to Sir Frederick Pollock.
. . . of success and power . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . setting in motion precisely the . . .
Ronald Hingley, Pasternak: A Biography.
. . . archetypal drama . . .
Bruce Scofield, President Clinton: A Quetzalcoatl for Our Times.
. . . not only of the love and murder from brother to brother, but also of the relationship between these competitive brothers and God, the father.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
______________________________________________________________

From the beginning . . .
Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel.
. . . the idea, . . .
Robert Mullan Cook-Deegan, Origins of the Human Genome Project.
. . . the central legend that I wished my book to express—had not changed. And this central idea was this: the deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man's search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united.
Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel.
________________________________________________________________

"All I wanted was my father's blessing."
Peter Blos, Son and Father: Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex.
His need for that approval was obviously "an innate, irrefutable feeling" that lasted to the end of his life.
Philip Rahv, Introduction to Selected Stories of Franz Kafka.
His relationship with his father, a relationship that was expressed, like man’s relationship with God, mostly by its absence, was, after all, the great sunless center of his being.
Rich Cohen, Lake Effect.
"I loved my father—I know that. What I did not know was that I also hated him—even worse: I despised him. When I despised him, it felt like God had come apart. I wanted my father to worship me, come down on his knees. Oh, 'love' and 'hate' is just speaking in the broadest terms. There is more. What? The wish to conquer him. . . ."
Peter Blos, Son and Father: Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex.
It is clear that the source of the principle of authority so characteristic of his art is to be traced to his ambivalent attitude to his father, an attitude of strong repulsion as well as identification. Constructed out of elements of his own personality, the protagonist of his major fictions is coerced by extranatural powers who are continually justified and exalted even as they are made to manifest themselves in the guise of a menacing and arbitrary bureaucracy.
Philip Rahv, Introduction to Selected Stories of Franz Kafka.
These are quite legitimate points of view . . .
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism.
Although on the other hand I must say that . . .
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis.
Divine bureaucrats do not squat on the ground under terebinth trees and devour roast veal so as to strengthen themselves to walk down the road and destroy a sinful city or two.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
I am reminded of . . .
Peter Blos, Son and Father: Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex.
. . . Jacob's all-night struggle with a nameless divine being . . .
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
. . . who wrestled with Jacob . . .
Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb, Iyunei Shabbat.
. . . until dawn. And when the being saw that he couldn't . . .
Genesis. A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories by Stephen Mitchell.
. . . beat his opponent . . .
Johannes Ehrmann, Float Like a Butterfly.
. . . he struck him on his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was wrenched out of joint.
And he said, "Let me go: dawn is coming."
And he said, "I will not let you go until you bless me."
And he said, "What is your name?"
And he said, "Jacob."
And he said, "Your . . .
Genesis. A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories by Stephen Mitchell.
. . . name . . .
Johannes Ehrmann, Float Like a Butterfly.
. . . will no longer be Jacob, Heel-Grasper, but . . .
Genesis. A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories by Stephen Mitchell.
. . . will become . . .
Sigmund Freud, Preface to the Hebrew Translation of Totem and Taboo.
. . . Israel, He Who Has Struggled with God, because you have struggled with God and you have won."
Genesis. A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories by Stephen Mitchell.
Jacob now said:
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
I will take my name from you
Richard Wagner, Die Walkòre.
“ Israel ” . . .
Ken Frieden, Freud's Dream of Interpretation.
. . . you call me and victorious I am!
Richard Wagner, Die Walkòre.
And Jacob said, "Please, tell me your name."
And he said, "You must not ask my name." And he left him there.
And Jacob named the place Penuel, The Face of God: "because I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been spared." And the sun rose on him as he passed . . .
Genesis. A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories by Stephen Mitchell.
. . . on the road . . .
Victor Debs, Jr., “That Was Part of Baseball Then.”
. . . through Penuel, and he was limping.
Genesis. A New Translation of the Classic Biblical Stories by Stephen Mitchell.
In Jewish households, he was . . .
Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy.
. . . destined to become . . .
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
. . . the New Patriarch: Abraham, Isaac, . . .
Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy.
. . . and Jacob:
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.
. . . Wrestling Jacob, . . .
Harold Bloom, Wrestling Sigmund: Three Paradigms for Poetic Originality.
. . . A rare distinction.
Robert Pinsky, Excerpt from The Night Game.
“His triumph surpassed mere success.”
Jane Leavy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy quoting Robert Pinsky (Poet Laureate of the United States).
What does it mean?
James Joyce, Ulysses.
The scriptures are unalterable and the comments often enough merely express the commentator’s bewilderment. In this case . . .
Franz Kafka, The Trial.
. . . the sage . . .
Franz Kafka, On Parables.
. . . Maimonides, . . .
James Joyce, Ulysses.
. . . a teacher of religion, . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . considered it a prophetic vision, a form of “internal” revelation taking place in Jacob’s psyche. Others, . . .
Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb, Iyunei Shabbat.
. . . I am certain . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . would argue . . .
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle.
. . . that this was an event which took place in the real world, as evidenced by the real impact it had, the injured thigh and the consequent limp (32:32).
Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb, Iyunei Shabbat.
At any rate, . . .
Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews.
. . . real or imaginary, . . .
Isaac Deutscher, Israel’s Tenth Birthday.
Might we not recognize in the biblical story of Jacob a paradigmatic reflection on one component of the son-father relationship which needs to be settled before childhood can be brought to a natural termination?
Peter Blos, Son and Father: Before and Beyond the Oedipus Complex.
_______________________________________________________________

We would like to believe that because the generations renew themselves and because the rhythm of the seasons recurs endlessly we do too; and because each day dispels the night, what is done can always be undone, or at least somehow mediated. But while Nature is cyclical and the mind, too, functions according to the principle of mastery through repetition and adaptation, the relation of cause to consequence is inexorable and cannot be rescinded. While learning the harsh lesson that all things have their price and that the consequences of the flow of time cannot be undone, we have to think, act, and feel as though they might be undone.
Gilbert J. Rose, William Faulkner's Light in August: The Orchestration of Time In the Psychology of Artistic Style.
_______________________________________________________________

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Burnt Norton.
For Freud, who seemed to use every hour productively, the momentary present was almost hidden between past and future. The present took its meaning from the larger perspective, the non-present, from which Freud derived his higher motive, his drive for success and permanence.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
It is impossible to date with any precision the time that Freud began his momentous self-scrutiny. By 1893 or, at the latest, 1894, the pressure for generalization always active within him had brought him to the recognition that the mental activities his patients reported to him strikingly resembled his own fantasies, thoughts, and wishes.
Peter Gay, Freud: For the Marble Tablet.
Within that same decade, Freud, a neurologist fascinated by hypnosis, created the science and art of psychoanalysis. He introduced the term in 1896, borrowing “analysis” from chemistry.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
During these years . . .
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
. . . the seemingly stable days of the 1890's . . .
Donald A. Wollheim, Introduction to H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
. . . Freud at times expressed some despair and confessed to some neurotic symptoms which reveal phenomological aspects of a creative crisis. He suffered from a “railroad phobia” and from acute fears of an early death—both symptoms of an over-concern with the all too rapid passage of time. “Railroad phobia” is an awkwardly clinical way of translating Reisefieber—a feverish combination of pleasant excitement and anxiety. But it all meant, it seems, on more than one level that he was “coming too late,” that he was “missing the train,” that he would perish before reaching some “promised land.” He could not see how he could complete what he had visualized if every single step took so much "work, time and error."
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
Every now and again he . . .
Ulisse Di Corpo, Syntropy: From the Past to the Future.
. . . thought of the problems in school arithmetic in which you are asked how soon and in what order trains, starting at different times and going at different speeds, get to their destinations; he tried to remember the general method of solving them, but it escaped him and he went on from these school memories to others and to still more complicated speculations. He tried to imagine several people whose lives run parallel and close together but move at different speeds, and he wondered in what circumstances some of them would overtake and survive others. Something like a theory of relativity governing the hippodrome of life occurred to him, but he became confused and gave up his analogies.
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
He was obviously, I believe, hiding the weaknesses in his nature, covering the areas which were most vulnerable to hurt, concealing the vast but vague designs shaping in his dreams. One of the weaknesses most noticeable and most significant was that lateness to arrive at the various stages of maturity. This had the effect of making much that went on about him slightly incomprehensible. He knew that certain things happened and would happen, but he was not quite certain why. And he did not want this insufficiency to be known. He went to great lengths to keep it hidden. That repository of concealment by now begins to seem bottomless.
Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt.
At this time, Freud speaks of his discoveries with the anguish of one who has seen a promised land which he must not set foot on:
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. . . .
If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
We look back on these . . .
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
. . . self-appraisals . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . now with bewildered irony.
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
The irony derives from what we already know of this character from outside the story—
Peter D. Kramer, Should You Leave?
Only in the very last of the letters to Fliess does Freud seem to have found his position in time and space: "I have readers . . . the time is not yet ripe for followers." The last letter, written in the last year of the 19th century, admits, "We are terribly far ahead of our time."
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
The train, gathering speed, . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . figuratively speaking, . . .
Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.
. . . was approaching . . .
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.
. . . its destination.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times.
I have reported above that in the years preceding the crisis Freud had presented to the psychiatric community his seduction theory of hysteria. This theory was briskly rejected by his academic colleagues and made a subject of ridicule, e.g., "as a scientific fairytale" (Krafft-Ebing). Thus, the discovery which Freud expected to be a breakthrough in the comprehension and treatment of emotional illness turned into an occasion of contempt and isolation from the academic world. This turn of events liquidated the son's wish to present to his father the gift of fame and distinction as expected of him. The theory of infantile seduction would oblige the son to subject his personal and intimate life with his own father to an objective scrutiny, in order to comprehend its influence on his own emotional development and present state of mind. The argumentation of some Freud biographers was predicated on the inference that an inhibition arose in the mind of the originator of the seduction theory which in essence protested: no, my father has never done improper things. . . .

I draw the conclusion from the crisis which Freud experienced in his 40s (1896-98) that his self-analysis following the death of his father facilitated, even though it was a developmentally anachronistic or delayed move, the resolution of his father complex—at least as far as he could take it at that time.

In contrast to the widely accepted opinion that the revocation of the seduction theory was issued under the forceful directive of an infantile inhibition and subordination to the father imago, it is my opinion that the liquidation of the controversial theory points to other determinants. One of them is to be found in his striving toward the liberation from the need or mandate to fulfill his father's wish to possess a famous, triumphant son. Fame was to come from his epochal discoveries in the world of the mind, comparable only to the revolutionary discoveries of a Columbus or Galileo in the world of space.
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
Freud seems to have shared Nietzsche’s impression that . . .
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
. . . to remain stuck to . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . an overvalued . . .
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
. . . science—even if it should lure us with the most precious finds that seem to have been saved up precisely for us . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
. . . could not be much good.
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
We must be patient and await fresh methods and occasions of research.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
He later confessed:
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
We must be ready, too, to abandon a path that we have followed for a time, if it seems to be leading to no good end. Only believers, who demand that science shall be a substitute for the catechism they have given up, will blame an investigator for developing or even transforming his views. We may take comfort, too, for the slow advances of our scientific knowledge in the words of the poet: . . .

'What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping. . . .
The Book tells us it is no sin to limp.'
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle quoting Friedrich Ruckert.
I call Freud, in the context of these uncanny notions, "Wrestling Sigmund," because again he is a poet of Sublime agon, here an agon between sexuality and the vital order. Our sexuality is like Jacob, and the vital order is like that one among the Elohim with whom our wily and heroic ancestor wrestled, until he had won the great name of Israel. Sexuality and Jacob triumph, but at the terrible expense of a crippling. All our lives long we search in vain, unknowingly, for the lost object, when even that object was a clinamen away from the true aim.
Harold Bloom, Wrestling Sigmund: Three Paradigms for Poetic Originality.
That word . . .
Edgar B.P. Darlington, The Circus Boys Across the Continent.
. . . Clinamen, which made the critic sound like a gardener with a filthy mind.
Anthony Lake, Infinite Exercise.
Ha! Absurd.
Candide, Excerpt from “Word, words, words,” lyrics by Leonard Bernstein.
To those who have never bumped into Bloom's prose before, this will sound at worst willful and at best gorgeously obscure. But you soon get into the swing of his persuasions, and it becomes clear that Bloom, like Emerson, gives himself helplessly to criticism as if it were poetry . . .
Anthony Lake, Infinite Exercise.
He’s not one of your common or garden . . . you know . . . There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
But this matters little. What is important is that . . .
Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe: A Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos.
. . . We are lived by drives we cannot command . . .
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
. . . And yet we search incessantly, do experience satisfactions, however marginal, and win our real if limited triumph over the vital order. Like Jacob, we keep passing Penuel, limping on our hips.
Harold Bloom, Wrestling Sigmund: Three Paradigms for Poetic Originality.
Freud, however, . . .
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther.
. . . a man who in lonely years struggled through a unique experience and won a new kind of knowledge for mankind . . .
Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility.
. . . had to "appoint his own neurosis that angel who was to be wrestled with and not to be let go, until he would bless the observer." Freud's wrestling with the angel was his working through his own father complex which at first had led him astray in his search for the origins of the neuroses in childhood.
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther.
Freud arrived at the conviction that the childhood remembrances of seduction which his female hysterics reported to him with such astounding regularity were, in many cases . . .
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
. . . nothing more than vivid fantasies . . .
Doreen Carvajal, Disputed Holocaust Memoir Withdrawn.
. . . that held an authority greater than historical truth.
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
[A]s such they evoked pathological reactions as severe as those founded on experiences in real life.
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
Freud protested that it . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths.
George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle.
If I understand anything of this great . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ.
. . . poet of Sublime agon, . . .
Harold Bloom, Wrestling Sigmund: Three Paradigms for Poetic Originality.
. . . anything of this great symbolist it is that he took for realities, for 'truths', only inner realities—that he understood the rest, everything pertaining to nature, time, space, history, only as signs, as occasions for metaphor.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ.
The conceptual demarcation between an experiential world that is related, on the one hand, to an inner life and, on the other, to the impingement of reality, and the implicit theoretical differentiation between the specific influences derived from these two worlds of experience upon the causation of psychic illness, ushered in the twentieth century. This demarcation was epitomized by Freud's mounting concentration on the . . .
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
. . . inner world of fantasy . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.
. . . namely, on his dream research which followed the death of his father. . . .

He thus succeeded in gaining access to the carefully guarded secrets and mysterious workings of the human mind.
Peter Blos, Freud and the Father Complex.
________________________________________________________________

One has to test oneself to see that one is destined for independence and command—and do it at the right time.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
________________________________________________________________

My sleep is no relaxation, my dreams continue my waking thoughts, that is, if I go to sleep at all. The other day I saw a map . . .
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire quoting Bismarck.
. . . a large map of the world.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
It is hard to know how others might judge this map made up of the dreams and visions of one man—
James Cowan, A Mapmaker's Dream.
Various small red pins had been stuck into different cities. It was clear that these represented cities around the world in which there were psychoanalytic institutes. It was Freud's private map of conquest. Like a general, he had stuck little red pins into the cities he had conquered for psychoanalysis.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Joseph is Sigmund Freud's precursor, not so much as dream interpreter but as a favored being who, like a conquistador, goes from success to success.
Harold Bloom, The Book of J.
Just as Columbus knew that he had discovered a fact—mistaken as he may have been about its interpretation—so Freud, I would guess, while he may have had his doubts about whether his theories of the etiology of neuroses would endure, was convinced that, with the discovery of . . .
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
. . . the unconscious, . . .
Joseph Conrad, The Arrow of Gold.
. . . this lower world . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . beyond the reach of being named,
Lucia Perillo, The Oldest Map With The Name America.
. . . he had discovered "a new continent."
K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius.
I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am nothing but by temperament . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . a conqueror but in the realm of mind, a Don Juan but of knowledge, an actor but of the intelligence . . .
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
. . . a conquistador — an . . .
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
. . . explorer of the new inner geography . . .
George and Patricia Kernodle, Invitation to the Theatre.
. . . an adventurer, if you want to translate the word — with the curiosity, the boldness and the tenacity that belong to that type of being. Such people are apt to be treasured if they succeed, if they have really discovered something; otherwise they are thrown aside. And that is not altogether unjust.
Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess.
The battleground of . . .
Howard Felperin, Undream'd Shores: "The Tempest".
. . . a Conquistador . . .
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo.
. . . is also the world of the audience, where we worldings and groundlings find ourselves striving for our moral lives with a master who has anticipated all possible defenses and counterattacks in a game we can win only if he does.
Howard Felperin, Undream'd Shores: "The Tempest".
My slumbers—if I slumber—are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not: in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Excerpt from Manfred.
. . . to gaze therein on . . .
William Shakespeare, Sonnet No. XXIV.
. . . a coat of arms . . .
George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life.
And what, it may be asked, has all this to do with Wagner?
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
Wagnerism was a movement—a cultural, social, and political movement—and not simply the love of Wagner's music.
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics.
As a matter of fact . . .
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation.
. . . there appears, high . . .
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: and Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
. . . Over our head as we enter . . .
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation.
. . . Wagner’s home, Wahnfried (“peace from madness”),
Simon Williams, Bayreuth: Summer Pilgrimage.
. . . the palatial villa Richard Wagner built for his family . . .
Nora London, Aria for George.
. . . the coats of arms of all towns possessing Wagner Societies on the moldings of the ceiling in the Wahnfried salon, . . .
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (editors' note).
. . . an extravagant expression . . .
Carl Fitzgerald, A Study of the Book of John.
. . . in visual imagery . . .
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation.
. . . of Wagner’s influence . . .
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner.
. . . at the turn of the century, when he all but dominated the intellectual life of the Western world.
Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers.
And look!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
The effect . . .
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
. . . of the ceiling . . .
Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo.
. . . is awe-inspiring:
Victor Gollancz, The Ring at Bayreuth: And Some Thoughts on Operatic Production.
. . . yes, a marvel.
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
One would have to conclude that the movement behaved very much like a chameleon, . . .
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics.
Who would not admire this chameleon?
Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther.
. . . and a particularly crafty one at that, in its ability to insinuate itself into so many different cultural and political scenes.
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics.
They accuse me—Me—the present writer of
The present poem—of—I know not what—
A tendency to under-rate and scoff at . . .
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Excerpt from Don Juan.
. . . the common ideal . . .
Otto Rank, The Don Juan Legend.
. . . and identify with . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
. . . the great and Titanic, only—
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
O nonsense!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Humility is not at issue here. I am talking about the exhilaration I feel knowing just how far a man can go in affirming his existence in relation to his peers.
James Cowan, A Mapmaker's Dream.
The world had changed, and . . .
John N. Burk, The Life and Works of Beethoven.
. . . through his art . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . Wagner . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II).
. . .had done much to change it, not by what he had exacted, but by a strange power in . . .
John N. Burk, The Life and Works of Beethoven.
. . . his project . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . which lifted all men in spite of themselves.
John N. Burk, The Life and Works of Beethoven.
Suppose it were the case that Wagner's success became incarnate, took human form and, dressed up as a philanthropic music scholar, mixed with young artists. How do you suppose he would talk? My friends, . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . he would speak of . . .
Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset.
. . . the "incomparable magic" of his works; music was . . .
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
—would you believe it?—
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
. . . the science of his art, . . .
Lucia Perillo, The Oldest Map With The Name America.
. . . without the which this story were most impertinent.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
The power of . . .
John N. Burk, The Life and Works of Beethoven quoting Wagner.
. . . Wagner . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II).
. . . the musician cannot be grasped otherwise than through the idea of magic. Assuredly while listening we fall into an enchanted state . . .
John N. Burk, The Life and Works of Beethoven quoting Wagner.
. . . the state . . .
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
. . . that is his magic.
J. Moussaieff Masson and Terri C. Masson, Buried Memories on the Acropolis: Freud's Response to Mysticism and Anti-Semitism.
A Prospero with book and wand who sought rule over a world of inferior spirits, he used music to sway the senses—to captivate, subdue, and lecture an audience rendered unquestioning.
Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music.
—Ah, this old magician!
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
The art of power and the power of art have become in Prospero's hands, not divided and distinguished worlds as they were before, but one and the same thing.
Howard Felperin, Undream'd Shores: "The Tempest".
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You want a formula for such a destiny become man?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.
Listen now! Mark this well, I beg of you, and let me save my breath—
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust.
I am of the opinion . . .
Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
. . . that you should . . .
Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days.
. . . be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.