In any occasion, the that means of those strains is now clear. America had no equal of the pan-European debates in regards to the origin of basalt— that is the essential little bit of context. There was battle in America, sure, however the battle was animated by issues of the second, and was not so “ineffective and fruitless” as this tussle in theoretical geology. Principally, there have been fewer issues in America that occasioned idle disputes as there have been in Europe. Not least “recollections that haven’t any goal”— these changeable shadows of an actual or imagined previous so expensive to the youthful technology of romantics, with their overabundance of historic consciousness.
Goethe used the basalt metaphor one different time. In a pocket book entry from 1819, he wrote, “Northamericans glad to not have basalt. No ancestors and no classical soil” (Melz 1949). I am reminded of maybe one of the best sentence Marx ever wrote: “The custom of all useless generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the residing.” Goethe may need added: in America the nightmare is absent, as a result of the load is much less burdensome.
He scribbled these strains, maybe, with a sigh. The getting older Goethe was apparently as weary as his previous continent. But his spirits lifted as he exhorted People:
Make glad use of this, your time!
And later when your kids rhyme
Of kinder fates, oh, maintain away
From robbers, knights, and ghosts, I pray.
* I used to be capable of finding one revealed paper that discusses “Goethe’s basalts” from a geological standpoint. This can be a < 1 web page communication in Eos by David Stern, during which it’s urged that the road about “ineffective, fruitless arguments” “expresses Goethe’s want to distance himself from your entire controversy [over the origin of basalt]” (Stern 2006, 256). Maybe!
Baldridge, W. S. 1984. The geological writings of Goethe. American Scientist 72:163–167.
Caisley, J. S. 2020. The (im)materiality of Goethe’s geology. Ph.D dissertation (College of Cambridge)
Geikie, A. 1897. The Founders of Geology. London: Macmillan and co.
Gillispie, C. 1951. Geology and Genesis: A Research within the Relations of Scientific Thought, Pure Theology, and Social Opinion, 1790–1850. Cambridge (MA): Harvard College Press.
Goethe, J. W. 1785. On Granite (Granit II). https://sciencegroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/4-essays-on-granite.pdf
Laudan, R. 1987. From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830. Chicago: College of Chicago Press.
Melz, C. F. 1949. Goethe in America. School English 10:425–431.
Oldroyd, D. 1996. Occupied with the Earth: A Historical past of Concepts in Geology. Cambridge (MA): Harvard College Press.
Stern, D. 2006. Goethe’s basalts Eos 87:256.
Sullivan, H. 1999. Gathering the rocks of time: Goethe, the romantics and early geology. European Romantic Evaluation 10:341–370.
Tietz, O. and Büchner, J. 2018. The origin of the time period ‘basalt.’ Journal of Geosciences 63:295–298.
Different sources
4 items on granite, written by Goethe and translated by M. C. Ekama: https://sciencegroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/4-essays-on-granite.pdf
A beautiful little (okay, sorta lengthy) essay on Goethe, geology, and granite: https://sciencegroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Goethe-and-granite.pdf
E. P. Hamm on Goethe’s mineral assortment (with some observations on his time at Ilmenau): https://www.jstor.org/secure/4028099?seq=14
Extra from Jennifer Caisley: https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/60 (and likewise see her chapter in Goethe in Context, which condenses some materials from her dissertation)
A pleasant article on the position of mountains in Faust: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1010&context=mll_faculty
