Reading Goethe these days, Faust. I detect a similar difficulty in all the variants of Faust I read, from Marlowe to Bulgakov, a sort of emptiness behind the characters. They are, after all, symbolic puppets; and the sort of deals we flesh and blood humans make with the devil are never so obvious or so rewarding. Screwtape, that admirable creation of C.S. Lewis, says that the devil prefers to give as little as possible while offering as much as possible; for the most part we have to deceive ourselves to enjoy the rewards of sin, and this is why there is always a note of insincerity in a Fagin admiring his jewels no matter how accurately he is limned. Perhaps the better he is drawn the more he has to realize that he is ogling a only a small quantity of metaphysical pixie dust.

I think this is the genius of Goethe’s Faust – diluted as it seems to me on a first reading by a number of scatterbrained scenes and a singsong translation – he says: show me something that I cannot see through. And the devil, Goethe’s principle of negation, scratches his beard and – the devil never turns down a bet – says he’ll try. And instantly the stakes pass from a single man’s soul to the soul of the whole world: if the devil can make something good enough to fool Faust then the created world is a humbug, or else man is something less than the image of God, a creature built to be decieved.

This Faust works for me, hindered as it is. Perhaps only because I too find it difficult to be satisfied: philosophy, music, books, and difficulty feed me only so long as I do not understand them. I attached myself to bicycling, to computer programming, to sailing, to this idea and that, and once I rode my bike over the mountains I laid it by and looked for something else.

Is there anything that can satisfy, and what is its nature? Is it infinite, is it satisfactory in itself, is it God? Does it transcend matter and time: do we find it only at infinity’s shore? Or is it composed of mundane stuff, of bits and pieces, useless gestures and misinterpreted statements? I dream, like Eliot, of some infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing.

 If you want to possess all
 You must desire to have nothing
 If you want to know all
 You must desire to know nothing
 If you want to be all
 You must desire to be nothing
 For if you desire to possess anything
 You cannot have God as your only treasure

    -- St. John of the Cross