Re-Reading Goethe and Conversations with Eckermann. A bit of Hesse from his essays “If this War Goes On” and Franz Rosenzweig “Philosophical and Theological Writings.”
Goethe in 1828 “If in a depressed mood we reflect deeply upon the wretchedness of our age, it often occurs to us that the world is approaching the last day. And the evil accumulates from generation to generation! It is not enough that we have to suffer for the sins of our fathers; we hand down to posterity these inherited vices increased by our own.”
Hesse:. War and Peace Summer 1918
“Like all human progress the love of peace must come from knowledge. All living knowledge as opposed to Academic knowledge can have but one object. This knowledge may be seen and formulated by thousands in a thousand different ways, but it must always embody one truth. It is the knowledge of the living substance in us, in each of us, in you and me, of the secret magic, the secret godliness that each bears in him.”
Rosenzweig. “Urzelle to the Star of Redemption. “Close at hand lies the objection that is inadmissible to call actuality “before” and “after”with the same names; the actuality of, say, God and the actuality created by God are completely two. Certainly they are two, which is precisely what I want to talk about, but how would this duality be so significant if language did not have justification and they were not also one. The man of philosophy and the philosophizing man are to be sure both “men”; the palm branch must not deceive us about this. I now assert that everything that proceeds between the Absolute and the relative “before” it is revelation, and everything (that proceeds) between the Absolute and the relative “after” it is nature, world, or whatever you want to call it.”
Evil-
Injections-
Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front and Catch-22 we're my original war books.