Appendix to the Appendix, or My Christmas Eve by Jean Paul
"Dreams and old age take a man back to childhood, and in the cold night of both, the nocturnal earthworms of childish madness creep over the heart again."
The Almanac has been silent for a while, but its author has been, despite all appearances, hard at work (I wrote “hard at word” on the first pass). At the beginning of the month, I finished a draft of The Parson in Jubilee by Jean Paul, and since the final chapter, the “Appendix to the Appendix” as J.P. calls it, takes place on Christmas Eve, I thought I would share a provisional version of it. If you would like more excerpts, they can be read here and here. The full manuscript should be edited in the next few months and then published through Empyrean Editions, with further details to be announced. I thank Jacob Siefring for both commissioning the translation and for putting his skilled editorial hand on this challenging passage of Enlightenment-era horror/metafiction/family comedy. Any deficiencies of accuracy and style are my own.
The book's final chapter, typically enough, has nothing to do with the plot or characters of The Parson in Jubilee. Instead, it’s an occasion for J.P. to congratulate himself for finishing the novel. This and other metafictional conceits, sprinkled liberally throughout the text as “Pastoral and Encyclical Letters”, are deployed once again on Christmas, when the author takes a holiday break from writing—by writing something else. If there’s a unifying mood across his work, it’s Jean Paul’s gentle satisfaction with his own quirks and hyperproductivity. This doesn’t mean he’s solipsistic, or that lacks a social conscience. He is sad and angered that laborers can’t enjoy Christmas the way he does, that they have to toil, holiday or no, to enrich their aristocratic overlords. His cutting observations wouldn’t be out of place in an early Marx manuscript.
J.P. then goes on to describe various German Christmas customs, some familiar through their adoption into global popular culture, some still quite strange to Anglophone readers. He’s fond of the magical flying Christkindl, that is the infant Jesus, who gives out presents to little boys and girls instead of St. Nicholas. But from there he ascends to even more phantasmagoric territory. For J.P., holidays are an occasion for meditating on deep time, for adopting a transcendental viewpoint, for previewing the ultimate fate of human civilization, of the planet, even of the universe and time itself. A similar turn of events happens in his short story “The Wondrous New Year’s Eve Company”. But no matter how skilled J.P. is at describing these horrific cosmological vistas, our narrator has to turn away; they are not for the human mind to comprehend, at least not when there are presents to be given and mulled wine to be doled out. He is enjoined by a disembodied voice, the voice of wisdom itself, to return to his terrestrial confines, which he does so gladly. “Go to your earth, you who have not yet died.”
And so, as another year edges toward its mortal fate, I (and Jean Paul too, I’m sure) wish everyone a very Merry Christmas.
The Appendix to the Appendix, or My Christmas Eve
Those who will call the present aftersummer of the preceding jubilee a “Fifth Pastoral and Encyclical Letter” are not lacking in perspicacity: for the other four were already addressed to the reader, and it was he who was the masked friend. The reader can, as well as a cowherd of Chaunay under Henry IV, be called tout le mond.[1] – I do not believe that an author likes to write anything more than his preface and his postface: here he can finally speak about himself, for pages on end, and about what delights him most, about his work—he has made the leap from his prison and galley-ship of the book to these two playgrounds and pleasure camps, and has twenty academic liberties with him and a liberty cap on his head, and lives there happier than his reader. These Saturnalia have been granted to us from ancient times, and none of us must allow our two festivals of freedom to be taken away from us: is this not why two empty pages, one at the prologue, one at the conclusion, are always pushed forward and backward by the bookbinder, as if they were white door panels, as a sign of admission, a sign that the next page is just as uninhabited and just as open to arbitrary writing? Yet these empty ha-has that enclose the garden of the book are also the deserts that must separate one book from another, just as large empty spaces separate the empires of the Germanic peoples or those of the North Americans or the solar systems. Therefore, no one will blame me for saving my previous speeches and resolutions—for I have been making this point since the title page—for special days, for utopian days, for days that I see the Rhine regions of hope encircling me, especially for New Year’s and leap days—for the longest days—for the shortest days—for the birthdays of my most beloved people – and also for the twenty-first days of March (when I myself stepped out onto our smooth ball) and for the first days of Christmas...
We are celebrating one of the latter today, and all the churches are singing around me. – – –
Many valid arguments could be put forward to defend and entrench myself for having kept the present “Appendix of the Appendix” for the first day of the feast, like so much stored fruit. In particular, it could be made to be understood that I waited for Christmas Day to have my Christmas joy, as if I were my own son and was generously being presented and showered with gifts by my good old father; at least men who write doxologies and appendices and give themselves a Christmas present as their own little Christkindl—one is often one’s own Knecht Ruprecht[2] anyway—can boldly compete with the junior jubilarians and ask them: “See here, why can’t a man have some Christmas cheer when he has as many years in his life as ancestors in the grave, can’t he jubilate and celebrate just as well as any junior, who has more gums and more of a sweet tooth than he has actual teeth? Can’t he do that, you little brat!” But they hardly do that: oh, a good lemonade[3] brings them now on the threshold of the garden gate of life—as court gardeners do—to a large bouquet of flowers as a gift, even though immediately afterwards in the long, thick court garden of life they will have more to look at than to peel, pack, and pick.
But what essentially inclined me to choose the present day was yesterday—one could not spend the holy magical vigil of Christmas better than in hope; so I gave myself the task of engraving today on my copper plate (in paper), with my burin, and of storing yesterday the most beautiful lines and the most beautiful colored inks to draw the appendix that is here... Alas! our still lifes are our only fruits, our palettes are our teapots and our pots of sweets; and the pot of inks and dyes is our flower vase.
The deceived prophet of lies, man, saves his choicest, thickest ham bones for the years when his teeth fall out; indeed, the most beautiful joys are not only saved for the pale autumn of our leafless existence—as all fairs wait for the meteorological autumn—, but also for the end of the mere calendar year, for the end and tail of a book, an epigram, a banquet, a crab, the best meat, the dessert service, in short, Christmas, is put aside. I would affirm and confess that it is madness and error, that it is sheer imprudence, to stack stock bones atop the salting barrel of life and cook and gnaw them away before anything else and any savory bits, since there is so little hope to be found in the mortality rolls for scraping out the middle, let alone the bottom, of the barrel, I would confess it (I have confessed), if every man were not exactly as happy as he believes he will be, if saving were not, so I believe, merely a more intellectual form of squandering and indulgence, if the inner-eye saw further than the inner-palette, if it were less negligent than necessary, since our starry and cloudy firmaments vault no higher than the vault of our skulls, that the inner heaven, which rarely is one, should replace, reflect, and obstruct the outer. And that is why I do not blame anyone, and why I believe that the preservation of a pleasure is in no way separated from the anticipation and prolongation of it, except (advantageously) in spirituality.
“But let us return to our subject!” I was about to say, when I perceived, with inexpressible joy, that I could not deviate from it, no matter how much else I dwelt on.
I enjoyed yesterday’s Christmas Eve in the hope that I would be able to describe it today on Christmas Day: I now enjoy it through recollection. It is not only logic that has its circle, which the philosophical Dürer makes easy and complete: joy too has its magic circle, its shining ring around the lead-colored Saturn of time.[4]
Yesterday almost everyone delivered sugar cane to the sugar refinery of my delight, with the sole exception of the master clothing cutters in the Prussian states: for I had to pity them. This trade still has the needle in its hand on today’s holiday, and the day after tomorrow it will be threading it again, for the laws take away the third note from the festival triad, the third holiday; so only one is left, a mere Sunday, so to speak. That is not much for a great festival, but it is enough. For even if one would like to grant the producing class as much heaven, namely holidays, as a substitute for the three degrees of torture—especially since the spring of their life is exactly like the spring of the moon, which never lasts longer than three days—one must still listen to what reason says. But reason says quite loudly that the common people should thank God when the state merely allows them their working days, let alone Sundays: major holidays actually belong to the high nobility, Sundays to the lower nobility, feast days of Mary and the Apostles to the dignitaries, and perhaps a half-measure of those to the common people. Do not the upper classes gladly observe the holy days of rest, from which the lower classes are exempted, and give back, in return, the opportunity to earn? For a chamberlain’s staff, for a steward’s staff, for a court, in brief, perhaps still preserves the most beautiful remains of ancient German customs, as sketched out, or rather copied down, by Tacitus; at any rate, I do not know where else I find the grand old German love of free life and play, where else I could find the beautiful escape from work common to all free savages, which only allows them hunting and war-making. Not only have free nations, for example the Greeks and Romans, spent three-quarters of the year in high festivals, but even now the free people within the episcopal heath or heathenry.
But if, as I said, I exclude the Prussian tailors, no one passed by my window who did not become an enlarged confection for my fancies... But why should I not paint the whole of Saturday? It must already be recorded in the Mannheim meteorological observations that yesterday morning the weather glass rose, the snow fell and the wind changed direction and ran ahead of the Three Wise Men like a star. Then the day and the work began, which I duly observed, so I could commence mine as well. I did not see a single person stalking the street, except for aproned runners storming after a three-day life, which, like Christ’s three-day death, was the exponent of eternity. The poor devils, the poor she-devils, who sow in the morning to reap in the evening, for whom there is, from seed to loaf, but a small difference in yield, obtain, by redoubled ardor in work, not only three days of rest, but also three days of expense—so that the State, or the Prince (that is to say, the State within the State) cannot lose in the bargain...
By God! why should not my breast grow as fiery and discontented as Möser’s?[5] Why should I not say it without any ironic digression—for ironic archery is forgiven but not earnest cannonade, for the princes and powers of this earth prefer to name themselves truthtellers, rather than the gentle and lowly at heart ,who dwell beneath their thrones—why should I not say it out loud that, firstly, it is terribly cruel to tear away holidays from schoolteachers, who have not even been paid for past, let alone present, schooldays—from the bent, overburdened clerks of clerics—from the so-called white Christian slaves or servants, who, like the black ones, have their own special allodial and free days allotted for their own labors, namely festivals and holidays—that, secondly, it is even crueler to curtail and attack the exalted hopes of the downtrodden and their religious desires simultaneously, and to redouble their work without their expertise, compounding old errors with new sighs—that, thirdly, it is not only immoral but also unnecessary, if not financially unsound (and this affects the true, insightful statesman more closely), to diminish our only popular festivals (the church festivals), since it is joy, not necessity, since it is not water and bread, but rather beer and spirits and manna from heaven,[6] that stretches and steels the muscles and tendons of work for, since, furthermore, the statistics of mortality among the negroes of the West Indies prove that one cannot, as in mechanics, substitute work for time, and finally, given the equally flourishing, or even more flourishing, state of other Protestant countries, full of festivals, and the natural emigration of forced Sabbath-breakers to these festive countries and given the imperial prerogative and power of the artisans to reduce the metallic yield of abolished festivals by half? – –
And yet I do not believe a word of what I said above. For how could I reasonably answer a minister of state when he asks me whether men learn to think like donkeys when they are burdened like them and whether, when the mill horse is blinded so that it may better turn the millstone, more occultation and less circulation are the result? For in fact, finches are blinded so that they sing, but people are blinded so that they remain silent.
– The clouds are now gathering and parting ever more beautifully and capaciously, and the high, distant heaven looks blue-eyed through its foggy cage at our passing day of joy... why do I scold and grumble and sigh? – Can I take up yesterday again and paint it, and thereby illuminate today? – So I’ll continue. I already said that everyone ran about yesterday. The sweat of exertion flowed down cheerful faces, and work and hope doubled the heartbeat simultaneously; – I saw in the street nothing but galloping children and chatting sœurs servantes, that is to say, maids, but at home the former sat and the latter ran, already giving thanks as well as soliciting for future benefit. – My fancies searched the house and found the younger children piously working out their new lives, while the older ones wished to be saved more through faith than through good works; Yes, I even found the parents—I looked into the window like the great St. Christopher[7]—transformed from a revolutionary tribunal into mere lawgivers, who no longer condemned the pious little ones to the galley, but only to passive, that is, milder, keelhauling. I saw houses where children, acting as copyists for the parents’[1] English customs, gave each other titular Christmas presents with warmed-over toys from previous holiday, and beforehand frightened each other terribly as they took turns playing Knecht Ruprecht. I heard the mothers’ hearts beat faster, I saw their eyes stay open longer—and each of these tired and anxious mothers reminded me of that old comforting thought, that mothers give our minds warmth, and fathers give us light, that we owe to the former the earlier incubation and animation of the heart through love, more than to the latter the enrichment of the mind, just as the newborn dove only needs to be warmed for a few days before it hatches forth. The poorest mother, whose thread of life is unwinding from her distaff, wants at least to give her child, for the space of a morning, something more savory than household bread—and the human stables (whose hermits themselves are clothed in the boar’s skin which, elsewhere, spread out as a mat, protects against the filth of sumptuous rooms) are embroidered and dotted with golden rain and silvery snow—and young mother brings her first-born son, all bundled up, with his still obscure soul, before the tree of knowledge illuminated and covered with bunches of golden apples, garlands of nuts and fruits, and sweetmeats, for the maternal heart, generous and impatient, cannot wait for the years when the beloved child, grown up, will be able to seize and taste these gifts that are still too early. Thus, in the syrup of violets that my imagination thickened and cooked, no stem fell, no ash scattered, except for the young conscripts who passed by and who would know no other Christmas tree than the one from which the corporal’s baton was made; on Christmas morning, they would leave the inn before dawn, with the recruiters, and go out into the countryside, passing only in front of illuminated windows embroidered with gold; the postilions, however, returned.
What struck me yesterday as gently as the usual ringing of the bells were three strange children to whom I lied. I confess it to critics and atheists, I convinced the three faithful disciples as much as I could in the proven error of a gift-giving Christkindl: he flies high and golden (I made them believe) over the houses and looks down on the good and bad deeds of the children and rewards the former and punishes the latter. I showed them without hesitation a peacock feather that had fallen off (as in the Middle Ages people were shown such quills as proof of the Archangel Michael), as he spread his wings and enfolded them again on the encircling city bastions...
It is childish and pedantic to weed out of children the joyful errors that can only bear rose-stalks and not nettle seeds. Chase Ruprecht away, but let the magical Christkindl fly with green-gold plumage between the reflected December clouds; for the former rises up grimly with tooth and claw in fever, but the latter flies, gilded and smiling, through a dark dream and through the last evening mists of the deathbed, and breaks through the dark haze with bright, golden points of light. –
The high faith of children in the human word, and thus their readiness to faithfully accept gross deceptions, is as great and as active as their—all-encompassing attention, which opens the painted gate of deception in spite of the lock; – hence the author of The Parson in Jubilee, when he was still a hussar (I mean, in a hussar’s fur coat), was unable to disclaim and editorialize, even from all the packed baskets and from all the preparations for the Christmas presents, even from all the smells of the painted toys and the hot baked goods, even from the hard evidence itself (when he saw real people giving presents), that no greater hand was active in this happy game: I assumed, like a theologian at least, that the Christkindl, since I saw his immediate influence abolished, resorted to the indirect means and gave gifts through earthly hands of flesh. And then, when this colorful mist condensed into rain: I could not have given a single fig for the whole thing. I still remember my slackening, desolate disenchantment at that time:...and so my spirit and every spirit, upon which the invisible maelstrom of life presses down, will forever stretch out its arms and wings towards a higher ether—our poor, dull heart, bound in the enclosure of our breast, in the clod of our earthly soil, on the treadmills of our nerves, will forever struggle and swell and thrash against the element in which it is meant to swim—for immensity is our place, and eternity is our time, and creation is only the forerunner of our beloved Creator. – –
Oh, that is why that time of youth, when reality was bigger and brighter than the narrow desire pressed into the child’s breast, never loses its shine: it was beautiful there, when no greater sky could cloud over our little heads than the heads that overcast us, and when we could still build our castles in the air, i.e. our castles of pleasure, out of the morning air (the air of our life)... it was beautiful there, when our father’s dressing gown still enveloped us as warmly and densely as the cloak of sleep, when the earth was still populated by imagination, and when, instead of eternity, we wished for nothing but years and wanted no higher than to be grown...
That is why, yesterday, when night came to barricade my pleasure walk and the divine path that the alley was for me, I retraced, on the floorboards of the parlor, the broken carriage track my childhood years had drawn with a heavenly Ezekiel chariot. All was calm in and around me; everywhere, I pictured mortal happiness with more certainty than usual, for the comings and goings of the household had ceased, the backsplash of feminine activity had fallen, the curtains of the windows and of the beds were spread in place, the parlor floor, scrubbed with sand, shone like the bottom of a sea, the rolling pins had ceased to roll, the roasting pans were quenched and cooled—everyone dear to me sat around me in anticipation—I ran and hoped—yes, I saw the joyful bird of paradise of flying beside the colorful cardinal of Advent[8] and dazzling us with its vibrant, shimmering plumage. – –
In such enthusiasm, it was impossible for me to take up a lesser book than—The Life of Fibel. Few books that I buy or make do I read with such delight as this most frequently printed little work, this gilded door handle on all university and teaching and learning buildings. I make my delight understandable by deriving it from the past great delight with which I saw my first abecedary with its gold metal lettering on the colorful wooden casement gleaming in my childish hands. Even the contents of the book, namely the 24 letters, are not indifferent to me, since I live off them by simply shuffling them properly like cards or lots; but the little work attracts me more when it is closed, and I see the golden ABCs from my golden age flickering before me on inlaid cover like a golden filigreed signature on a triumphal arch. – – But yesterday, as I looked at the ruins of the past, freshened up with gold paint, I suddenly felt like one who has awakened from a long sleep, and it seemed to me that I had only slept for an hour, that is, lived—I asked myself: can time have sunk so far back, whose epitaph stands so brightly before and within you in raised metal letters—is the day of life not only as dark and cold as Christmas Eve, but also just as short? – –
But I dictated to myself a mourning routine, and, in order not the blacken the four chambers of my brain, I made pass through them, as in a magic lantern, images of morning, vibrant and alive, images of all the joys which, at that moment, fluttered over other lands: “At this hour, thousands rest from their fatigues—a thousand suckling infants slumber drunken on the breasts of their mothers, who lean gently over them—now the sun emerges, like the head of a sea god, from the burning sea, and casts its roses on islands, and these islands gaze at the crown of their shores amidst the enchanted waves—at this minute, the sun departs the vast harvests of other lands, hides itself behind the crowns of orange trees, then behind ears of wheat, and finally behind three roses in the foliage, to shine only, veiled, in the moved soul of a poet who follows it with his eyes. – How many lovers, at this hour, embrace! How many reunite after a separation! How many children open their eyes for the first time beneath our clouds, and their parents smile for them! How many tears of joy, like a stream of pearls, does the Genius of the Earth see falling, among the song of nightingales and joyous festivals! – How joyfully do I see the colorful chain of beings and flowers, with dry eyes and blissful hearts, moving around the earth! And, oh Good Genius, do I not belong to it, at least as far as I can see?”
Alas, I soon tore myself away from the garlanded procession, because my aroused imagination showed me a second, mournful parallel procession, which, bowed and wrapped in veil, walks silently or lamenting through this narrow theater. But I will not lead you into the dark cabinet of mourning pictures, which I have hung beside the nocturnes of the mourners of this funeral train, and in which I have painted how many wounds and graves are being dug in this very minute—how many sighs are being heaved—how many of our brothers and sisters are turning pale in despair—how many are being separated, abandoned, despised, trampled, and pierced through… No, let hope close this Trophonius cave, this gloomy hall of mourning.[9] – But in this melancholy mingled with pain and joy, which, sometimes powerless against the profound thunderclouds of suffering, knows no other remedy, on the path of life, than to lie down in the last cavern, the safest of all, but also the coldest and narrowest, but which, sometimes, in contrary motion, straightens up, smiling through its pain, and which recognizes more easily, in the clouds of sorrow, the image of infinity and its sky, as through a blackened glass we may gaze at the sun of the physical sky, – – – in this confounded state, haunted by adverse dreams, I sought the sleep which, with a lighter and shorter dream, appeases the antagonism of others.
But I did not find it. The winter hours passed lazily with their long shadows. My inner images became brighter and more active with electric sparks and finally moved, in the black space of night, first before my closed eyes, then before my open ones. I looked forward longingly to the illuminated morning hour of today as if it were a dewy spring. –
I went to the window to throw the night frost as alpine snow into the hot magic potion of my fantasies; I wished also to drink in more fully the Christmas music trumpeted from the windswept iron battlements over the gray houses below. Below me lay a sleeping lane of extinct charnel houses – over the pale snow the black mourning train of the melted stream drew its long folds – bare trees latticed the white plain with their black skeletons, and the broad mourning border of gloomy forests ended the pale hills – over the blue-black sky dissolved clouds, like enlarged snowflakes, were driven, and around the eternal low suns the fluttering haze of the earth shimmered.
When the night wind, the only living breath of nature, cooled my heated forehead and my closed eyes and wreathed spring leaves around my dreams: so came true dreams and rigid sleep.
Dreams and old age take a man back to childhood, and in the cold night of both, the nocturnal earthworms of childish madness creep over the heart again. I dreamt I was climbing the highest iceberg on earth, kneeling at its summit, putting my ear to the locked church and cemetery gate of the future of this year and listening to it. Beneath the ice mountain lay the cities and churchyards of the earth far away in the twilight depths—everything was asleep, nothing shone, nothing moved, and the whole earth was bestrewn from one city to the next, like from the crater of the grave, with silent ash.
But when I looked up into the sky, the twitching constellations moved and pursued one another—each image painted its bright outline in the blue with shooting rays like sparking storm clouds—the sky moved amid the struggle of the electric, motive figures—the dragon rose to the summit of the sky and devoured the suns of its orbit and the Pole Star—the scorpion and the dog lay gnawing on lofty Orion—the crab pierced the twins with its two claws—and the raven pecked at Virgo, and the water serpent reared back in flight.
The witching hour drew ever closer. The bells beneath me spoke incessantly, striking the eleventh hour every minute. I could only look down fearfully at the slumbering, shadowed plain. Finally, all the distant clocks struck the sixtieth minute, and the witching hour began. Then, from beneath the earth, a storm rose to the horizon and shook the rising constellations and drove them back to ground, and the ashes of the dead whirled about, and chimerical images flashed through the flurries—these luminous figures were ghosts and consisted of eyes.
The spirits of light drew the ashes of the dead and shrouded themselves in them, and from them formed human bodies and figures that I knew. They acted out the tumult of life—the spirits in the dust wept like sleepers, and others laughed with their ashy lips—they made graves and laid the figures of children in them, others held up mothers’ arms and pressed small beings to their cold breasts. – Then a new gust of wind drove the cloud of mortal dust from the white, barren battlefields of previous years. And the glittering spirits swathed themselves in the battle smoke and, so embodied, grimly acted out future battles, and the falling warriors groaned only as they fell, but no tears and no blood flowed from the ashes.
And as I raised my eyes to heaven in lamentation and prayed: “O Father of comfort, give the poor mad men peace and love!” I saw the starry dragon between Arcturus and Cynosura flap its nebulous wings and descend—and as it sank burning, the mountain of ice melted and collapsed, and the ashes fluttered about me, and a playful figure sought to penetrate my body, so that it might[3] reflect my transgression, and the nearby earth, this ash-urn of our warm dust, engulfed me, and a glowing star fell from the hovering dragon onto my heart. – – Then my spirit was freed and blazed up above its broken earthly shell…I hovered firm and motionless above the whirlpools of the rolling earth, and the revolving world led its countries and peoples beneath me. Oh, how much misery and how much delight fled by! Now the ball rolled past a stormy, screaming sea and tumbling ships with chained coffins flying after them—now past a Persian valley, glowing with carnations and lilies and daffodils and smoking from hanging flower gardens on peach trunks—past battlefields full of strangling angels followed by fragrant gardens with tender embracing lovers—now two arms came, lifting up amazed delight, now two others, lifting up misery—and the ball showed me bedded on its soft flowers the happy sleeper and beneath him the prone miner and mining negro, working like a corpse buried alive—rainbows on cold thunderstorms and on lofty waterfalls, cities burning beneath thunderclouds and shimmering meadows in the morning dew—, a death knell hummed its peals of joy, the dawn dissolved into sunset, and the raging ball rolled the whole human race clinging to it, all its forms sublime and weeping, crushed and decayed, and all our tears and wreaths and sickbeds and games, all our pains and all our blisses out as they fled side by side: I am eternal. – – Then the pride and power of immortality arose in my spirit, and it said: hurry down, filthy ball, with your winged pains, with your winged joys, you are far too fleeting for an immortal!
But when the receding globe bared its sun and the suns behind it—and when my mature eye saw a thousand earths floating around the other suns and all the dark lumps rushing by with the overturned neighborhood of paradises and graves, of miseries and joys, my breast broke with despair and I cried out: “O Infinite, will your finite beings be nowhere happy? Oh! when will the weary soul find satisfaction?”
A gentle sound answered: “Upon no earth—but after death—by infinite love, by infinite wisdom.” – And here the earth returned from its year and flew down from the sun above, and the sound sang ever more beautifully and softly: “Go to your earth, you who have not yet died.” And here all the worlds flying in the depths became a trembling chime, and my comforted soul rose gently drawn towards the old falling earth—and a sparkling circle of two linked rainbows was laid around its round shore—and it pulled me to itself, shaken, and I woke up...
And up around the tower the holy sounds of Christmas morning flew, and the morning wind brought them in silence—beneath me the dark river flowed with its old waves and eternal tones—the constellations of the sky stood firm and bright, and the clouds, piled up by the night wind and colored by the deep, rising sun, lay mountainous in the east—and in a few neighboring houses the trees, bedecked with sweets and fruits, were bedecked with lights as well, and the children, awakened too soon by the music, cavorted around the burning branches and the silvered fruit.....
[1] Henry III of Navarre, later Henry IV of France (1553-1610) was nicknamed “El Vaquero” or the cowherd. A Calvinist, he lead Huguenot forces during the French Wars of Religion, and was at the town of Chaunay when he received news that his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre had died.
[2] In certain Germanic Christmas traditions, Saint Nicholas is accompanied by a servant, Knecht Ruprecht, who beats naughty children with a switch and gives them gifts of coal, similar to the now better-known, though at the time more obscure, tradition of Krampus.
[3] [Author’s footnote] The nymph of the meadows.
[4] The German painter and printmaker, Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), also contributed to mathematics, especially in the description of conic sections, as well as including representations of classical geometry in his melancholic artwork.
[5] Justus Möser (1720–1794) was a German jurist and conservative theorist who heavily criticized the social dislocations effected by industrialization and the capitalist economy.
[6] [Author’s footnote] A man who simply wishes to avoid starvation need not work much; this is demonstrated by beggars, and by the Italians, the Spaniards and the Portuguese.
[7] This particular iconography, with the patron saint of travelers staring through a window, was obscure to the translator.
[8] [Author’s footnote] The Norwegians believe that the bird only appears on the fourth day of Advent.
[9] In classical mythology, Trophonius was an uncertain figure—alternately called daimon, demigod, or god—associated with an oracular cult in Boeotia, Greece. Because of the secretive rights held there, entering the Cave of Trophonius became a byword for a frightening experience.