Georg Buechner

 

Georg Buechner, one of the most renowned writers in German, was born in 1813 in the small Hessian town of Goddelau. His father was the physician Karl Ernst Buechner, and his mother was Louise Carolina Buechner, born Reuss. He was the eldest of eight chidren, two of whom died in infancy. Of Georg's five surviving siblings, three became prominent authors.

In 1816 the Buechner family moved to Darmstadt, where his father was employed as a physician by the city and a hospital in addition to maintaining a private practice. It is not known what sort of education Georg received up to the age of eight; at that age he began attending private schools in Darmstadt. Among the subjects he studied continuously from ages 8 to 18 were French, Latin and Greek. At 16 he attended a short intensive course in Italian.

In 1831, at age 18, Buechner moved to Strasbourg and enrolled in the medical school there, and studied comparative anatomy until 1833, when he transferred to the university of Giessen back in his native Hesse, which allowed a maximum of 2 years of foreign study.

Buechner had become politicized during his time in Strasbourg at the latest. In 1834 he wrote and published the first of his works which would eventually become world famous, a pamphlet he called the Hessische Landbote, known in English as the Hessian Courier, a bold condemnation of the Hessian regime and its mistreatment of the people in Hesse. The Hessian authorities sought to arrest him, but he was able evade them. Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, a protestant pastor, one of the people who helped Buechner distribute his pamphlet, was arrested, tortured, and died in 1837 in prison under circumstances which still have not been satisfactorily explained.

As a fugitive, Buechner wrote one masterpiece after another: Danton's Tod, a portrayal of the last days of the French revolutionary Georges Danton, one of the former colleagues guilloutined by Robespierre; Lenz, a novella based on the life of the Sturm und Drang poet; Leonce und Lena, a play satirizing the ancien regime; and, greatest of all, Woyzeck, a heart-rending tragedy portraying a soldier who goes insane after being mistreated by a gruesome doctor who uses him for medical experiments and limits his diet to peas, his unfaithful wife and his cruel superior officers. Woyzeck was incomplete when Buechner died, and the manuscript was in such a bad state that it was several decades before it was published. Nevertheless, the play has been performed all around the world, and served as the basis for several films including the version directed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the title role, and an opera by Alban Berg.

In the meantime he continued his medical studies, specializing in the nervous system, which were impressive enough to win him a position in the faculty of the University of Zuerich.

And in 1837 he died of typhoid fever, just 23 years old.

Charisius

Flavius Sosipater Charisius was a 4th-century Latin grammarian, the author of an ars grammatica in 5 books. He is believed to have come from Africa, and to have spent the later part of his life in Constantinople. Like some other ancient grammarians, his work was used as a Medieval textbook, and is mostly of interest to contemporary scholars for its many quotations of earlier authors, some of whom would otherwise be known to us only by name, or not at all, with which Charisius juxtaposes his basic lessons of school grammar. 

Our text of Charisius has substantial gaps. Our primary source is a manuscript copied at Bobbio early in the 8th century and known as N for Naples, where it currently resides, one of the few Dark Age Latin manuscripts of non-Christian texts which we have today, referring with "Dark Age" to the period between the 5th-century Fall of the Western Roman Empire and the 9th-century Empire of Charlemagne. N is written on pieces of 6th-century parchment re-used for the purpose.

Besides N, there survive a few fragments of another 8th-century manuscript, called p, for Paris, its current home, and some miscellaneous later fragments and quotations by other authors. In addition, in the late 15th or early 16th century, a copy, n, was made of the fragile and crumbling N. n preserves some passages no longer legible in N.

The first edition of Charisius, by Johannes Pierius Cyminus, appeared in Naples in 1532.

The standard text of Charisius today, as far as I have been able to determine, remains the Teubner edition of Barwick published in 1925, which was re-published in 1964 with corrections and additions by Kuehnert.

Random Notes

I've been screwing up some of my favorite songs, "Weird Al" style. The Who's "Eminence Front," for example: "People forget/ Forget they're hiding/ Behind an elephant's butt/ It's an elephant's butt/ It's a big one." 

And then there's "Family Affair" by Sly & the Family Stone. I've given it what I call the Goldilocks Treatment: "It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears/ It's a family of bears / It's a family of bears."

It has occurred to me that the Casio G-Shock Rangeman GW9400-1,

because of its size (large), shape (closer to spherical than most watches made since AD 1600), styling cues and startling range of technical capability (solar recharging, radio synching with an atomic clock, altimeter, barometer, ambient-air compass, a really nice backlight, etc, etc), could be nicknamed the Death Star. I am aware that Citizen has a watch called the Death Star, and I am unimpressed.

In my life I've only had one brand-new car, a 2003 Saturn Ion 1. I still have it. Lately I have begun to daydream that if I keep it long enough, like an original VW Beetle or a Pontiac Aztek, it will suddenly change from a cheap piece of junk into an expensive collector's item. I am aware that this is an unrealistic fantasy.

I've been looking at the footnotes in John Stoye's The Siege of Vienna, NY, Chi, SF, 1965, and almost all of the sources are in German, with a few in French. I found one in Italian. And I found one in Romanian, which impressed me for about a minute, the amount of time it took me to figure that Stoye could've had someone translate it for him. No Turkish, no Polish, no Hungarian, no Czech -- unless I overlooked something, which is possible. Even so, Stoye was certainly no Runciman. 

There are those who think Runciman's linguistic prowess has been greatly exaggerated. I am not one of those.

The Wrong Monkey and the Wrong Van: Another Amazing True-Life Story

The police car had been idling outside for a while, so I stepped outside and asked the police officer what was going on. She pointed to the van parked across the street from my place and said that it was going to be towed.

I became upset immediately, pointing to a neighbor's home, saying that this was his van. 

She said there had been a complaint, that the van had been parked there for too long, that it was therefore going to be towed, and basically, that that was that, although she phrased it more politely. Throughout the entire episode she remained perfectly pleasant and polite.

I begged and pleaded, told the police officer what a great guy my neighbor was, insisted that this was wrong, I was relentless. She didn't budge an inch. 

I asked whether there was a least a way that I could complain about the complaint. She gave me a phone number, I was connected with a lieutenant, and the next little while was very much as it had been with the first officer, with me begging and pleading and the lieutenant not budging.

A little while after the police car departed, before any tow truck arrived, I saw my neighbor, and I excitedly told him he had to moved his van or it was going to be towed. 

"That's not my van," he told me calmly. 

I told him I was sure I had seen him and his mother moving that van and moving stuff in and out of it. 

He said that his mother had a vehicle similar in size, shape and color to the van. He also mentioned that it had been him who had made the complaint about this van. 

I reflected, and thought that, if I subtracted the times I had seen my neighbor and his Mom and the other vehicle, then this van had been here for a long time, and I hadn't seen it move, and it did seem as if it had been abandoned. 

I called the police number again. The dispatcher immediately remembered me. I told her that I saw now that I had been mistaken, and wished to apologize to everyone.

I could clearly picture the police officer who had arrived earlier in her car, and the lieutenant, and perhaps still other people, knowing that I was complaining about a van belonging to a certain person, and knowing that the person I named as the owner, and his address which I was pointing to, was the same person with the same address who had called asking for the van to be towed.

Alernat/ive Histories and Energy

I think about alternate histories. For example, an alternative history where Archduke Franz Ferdinand  avoids assassination, thus avoiding World War I and unlocking greater powers of science. I've done this one before on this blog, but let me go deeper this time. 

In my alternate reality, people all over the world, astonished by the spectacle of Franz Ferdinand and Gavrilo Princip talking to and learning from one another, drop all sorts of opposition: ethnicity against ethnicity, prince against peasant, boss against worker. In place of fear and hatred come fascination, knowledge, hope.

In our "reality," electric vehicles first appeared in the 1830's, and were quite viable by the turn of the century, but by 1914 they were being overtaken by the gasoline-powered stinkers we're familiar with. But in this alternate reality, where Franz Ferdinand lives and saves the life of his would be assassin Gavrilo Princip, scientists not only successfully discourage any dangerous accumulations of radioactive materials, but also are successful in arguing the merits of electric vehicles. Coal, oil and gas stay in the ground alongside uranium. Inner cities only very briefly go from the stink of horse poop to the stink of gasoline, before relatively odorless electrical motors and batteries take over.

In "reality," photovoltaic cells were invented in the 19th century. In my alternative timeline, with the petrochemical lobby strangled in its crib by those very same helpful scientists, solar generation of electricity is mankind's primary source of power by 1920, followed by wind, tidal and geothermal. Burning stuff on a large scale now seems somewhat remote, like living in caves.

Is there a point to such enjoyable mental games? I think so. I think they show us how much power we have to stop destroying ourselves.  We could've done it in 1914, we can do it now. The biggest obstacles to the adoption of solar and wind and other clean sources aren't technological, they're various forms of human stupidity. They're the lobbies of oil, coal and gas, buying laws which stand in the way of the spread of better ways of doing things. It's the attitude that says we have to put up with people like Elon Musk in order to transition to clean energy. It's the acceptance of limitations in general. The primary obstacle to progress in between people's ears.

From Henry VIII to Richard Nixon

Political, religious, social and cultural leaders often bring forth popular movements at odds with their own intentions. Perhaps this is particularly true of religious leaders, or perhaps it seems that way to me because I've been studying the history of religions lately. 

Henry VII's son Henry was born in 1491, became King Henry VIII of England in 1491, shortly before his 18th birthday, and reigned until 1547. In 1521, with Lutherism spreading quickly all over Europe, Pope Leo X declared Henry to be defensor fidei, Defender of the Catholic Faith. In 1530, however, Henry became a Protestant when Pope Clement VII refused to grant him a divorce. 

Henry envisaged the Church of England as being very much like the Catholic Church, except that it would allow divorce, thus allowing him, he thought, to have many sons, making the succession of the English crown more secure. But once he opened the door, many forms of Protestantism poured in. 

There were very bloody religious conflicts in England for a long time after Henry VIII died. By far the bloodiest was that we now call the English Civil War, from 1642 to 1651, pitting King Charles I, very Catholic-friendly, against Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan, as Calvinists were called in England, and not Catholic friendly at all. 

During the Civil War many new Protestant denominations sprang up in England. One of these became known as the Quakers. Their official name was and is the Friends, but they accepted that they were known as Quakers. The Quakers took the Protestant principal that a Pope and a strict Church hierarchy were unnecessary, took it much further, and declared that no preachers were necessary, and that no-one should tell anyone else what to believe.

The Quakers said that everyone had within them an inner light. They said that everyone should look within themself to understand what was right. And so, naturally, many of them were killed by Anglicans and also by Puritans, both in England and in the American colonies, where many of them emigrated. Quaker emigration increased greatly after 1681, when King Charles II gave William Penn, a Quaker, the colonial territory which would become known as Pennsylvania.

Not only Quakers came to Pennsylvania. Their reputation for religious tolerance also attracted many Lutherans, as well as many Protestants from Germany who no longer called themselves Lutherans, such as Baptists and Pietists. Some of these offshoots of Lutheranism greatly resembled the Quakers in their de-emphasis on church hierarchy, their encouragement of all members to participate and speak in their meetings, and their pacifism.

Spinoza, when he was cast out by the synagogue of Amsterdam, found friendship and support from Quakers who had emigrated to Holland. John Locke was exiled from England in the 1680, and he too found friendship among Dutch Quakers. Two examples of those who found that you don't have to be a Quaker to be accepted and defended by Quakers.

Remember, officially, they've never been called Quakers. Officially, they're Friends.

And yes, Richard Nixon was a Quaker. Some might say that he was not a particularly good Quaker. Others might possibly refer to Matthew 7:1, a Bible verse not infrequently cited by Quakers over the centuries.