Although
I began consciously assimilating the lives and ideas of those contributors to
Western Civilization that I encountered by reading to Mr. Cohen, I realize now
that a life is being continually constructed by the culture that surrounds us
and the opportunities that come our way.
I realized this when I first read Goethe’s Faust. He wrote the play in
two books. Book I is the familiar theme
of Faust the professor, discontent with his life at 50, making a pact with Mephistopheles
to explore life to the full as a restored 20 something. It is the story of his love affair with
Marguerite and the calamity he brings in his wake as he discovers the sensual
life he had neglected. Book II deals
with the next 50 years of his life and he tries out exploring, money-making,
militarism, conjuring back Helen of Troy (and producing a child homunculus with
her), and as he approaches his hundredth year he applies everything he learned
to laying out a design for a city, serving as a city manager, helping to design
harbors, turn pestilential marshlands into fertile soil for bumper crops, and
allow opportunities for the growing population to engage in international trade
and the diversity of culture it brings. It
is at this point where he tells Mephistopheles that he wants to continue serving
humanity through science that he loses the bet with the devil. But
before Mephistopheles can claim his soul, God intervenes and takes the dying
Faust’s soul to Heaven, praising him for having striven to fully explore the
gift of his humanity.
I
read this for the first time when the Honors College at Stony Brook University
was formed about 1989 and this was one of the books assigned to the freshman
class on “progress and its discontents.”
As I read the book I realized I had a Faustian personality. I did not repeat a year. I always looked for something new to add to
my knowledge, some new skill to acquire, and a zest for plunging into life and
enjoying it as much as I could. Fortunately I had a moral restraint Faust
lacked until his decrepitude. My high
school exposure to those Greek thinkers and writers had as firm a grip on my
desires as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” had on the economy and its usually
beneficial outcomes. The Faust theme
still resonates in my mind and I have a draft of a novel with the working
title: Faust: My First Fifty Years.
In it I explore Faust’s childhood. I
make him the grandson of Gutenberg’s business partner, Johan Fust (who changed
his name to Faust as his printing business prospered). I have my Faust become a priest and physician
who teaches the science and math courses in the Renaissance universities he
moves to. He is also assimilating the
findings of the Renaissance and I have him meet Fracastoro, Machiavelli, Da
Vinci, Columbus, and Copernicus as he travels in Europe buying and copying
manuscripts for his father’s printing company.
He is in Wittenberg when his student, Martin Luther, begins the Protestant
Reformation. I make my Faust the
proto-scientist who learns from experimentation and whose work leads to the Faust
legend of his being a magician, in league with the devil, and a sinister
character, chased from one place to another whenever his past catches up with
him or when he introduces the findings of his science to his medical practice. I
am still revising this book and hope it will be finished before I am.
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