Elective Affinities

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Granted this fashion of argument, Eduard replied, you women would be invincible: first sensible, so that one cannot contradict; affectionate, so that one is glad to give in; sensitive, so that one does not want to hurt you; full of premonitions, so that one is frightened.
I am not superstitious, Charlotte replied, and would pay no attention to these obscure stirring if that was all they were; but mostly they are instinctive recollections of the happy or unhappy consequences of our own or other people's past actions. There is nothing of more significance in any situation than the intervention of a third party. I have known friends, brothers and sisters, lovers, married couples, whose relationship has been altogether changed, whose life has been turned upside down, by the chance or intended arrival of another person.

But before long they separated again. The ladies retired to their wing, where they found plenty of entertainment exchanging confidences and criticizing the latest fashions. The men busied themselves with the coaches and horses and were soon horse-trading and horse-exchanging.

Take some subject, some matter, some idea--call it what you will. Take a really firm grip on it. Be clear about it in your own mind in all its parts. It will then be easy, by talking to a group of children, to discover what they already know of it and what they still have to learn. No matter how inappropriate their answers are or however far from the point they wander, so long as your next question draws their minds and thoughts back to the subject in hand, so long as you do not let them draw you away from it, the children are bound in the end to think and understand only what and in the way the teacher wants them to. The greatest mistake a teacher can make is to let his pupils draw him away from the point, is to be incapable of keeping them fixed to the subject he is at that moment treating. Try doing it yourself, and you will find it very interesting.

Charlotte climbed further up and Ottilie carried the child. Charlotte was sunk deep in thought. Even on dry land it was possible to be shipwrecked; to recover from it as quickly as possible was a fine and praiseworthy thing. Life was, after all, only a matter of profit and loss. How many plans went awry! How often one was diverted form one's chosen course! How often we were turned aside from a clearly envisaged goal so as to achieve a higher! The traveller on his way breaks a wheel and is greatly annoyed by it, yet through this unpleasant accident he makes the most agreeable connections and acquaintances, which then go on to influence his entire life. Fate grants us our desires but it does so in its own fashion, so that it can give us something over and above what we desire.

Maybe Elective Affinities is better in German. I must say, as one who particularly admires Goethe's Faust, this little novel did not cut the mustard. Particularly, I would draw your attention to the second quote above. Elective Affinities is full of such cliche statements. You hope, and expect, from such a master as Goethe a knowing and artistic use of archetypes already so worn and abused: he does not deliver. His characters are more than mere cliches, but they partake of them often enough--whether they are women discussing needlework or men slapping their thighs and talking about politics--to make you wonder if the cheap characterization of men and women by society may not be true. I don't believe it is, but Goethe seems to in this one.

Goethe did put the incomprehensibility of love down right, though. That his characters fall in love with whom they do, seems to make no sense until it is seen as not needing to make sense, after which it of course makes complete sense.

Elective Affinities might be called Goethe's ode to 'chemistry', that oft-blamed term that gets blamed for both love and hate and inability to get along as well as perfect connubial bliss. In Goethe, we are attracted to the souls we are, by and like chemical properties, and that stronger bonds lurk that can always pull us away from the bonds we've formed, seemingly without hope. What is love now, will be as much love when you leave it cold for that stronger love--it's just that in the presence of a catalyst, hydrocarbons would rather form carbon dioxide and water than stay as they were.

Though observation isn't really an argument, I'd like to point out that if Goethe's right, we're all screwed. But I don't buy elective affinity in romance, and I'm very suspect of the term 'chemistry' in romance. This might only be because I never liked Chemistry (the subject). As before, I choose insanity.