Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.Jean Paul
General
Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
Jean Paul
Fiction
Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic
chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline
which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and
even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the
anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine
architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his
favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of
nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the
living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[89]; or when
Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly
on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and
the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in
his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula
of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and
beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,--when one
cloud became conductor to another,--when at last the gleaming mass of
cloud came together,--then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often
does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes
into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven
of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and
... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment
open.
We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly
than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow
defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us
the black-lead, ascribe to the _coloring_ the unrecognizableness
of the _drawing_; but they ought to charge it merely on their
non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays
hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of
the philosophers--since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with
their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their
contents--than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa
and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean
gardens of poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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