Luciana’s Reviews > Georg Buchner: Complete Plays and Prose > Status Update

“it seemed as if he existed all alone, as if the world had its only place in his imagination, as if there were nothing but himself; he believed himself eternally damned […]. He ran through the events of his life with insane speed […]. […] It was the abyss of incurable madness, a madness that would last for eternity.”

“It was as if he were two entities, and one entity tried to save the other and called across to himself.”

“If he was alone, or reading, it was even worse; at times his entire mental faculties would become obsessed with a single idea. If he thought of another person, or tried to imagine [them], then it seemed he became that person.”

“When alone, he was so dreadfully lonely that he constantly spoke out loud with himself, called out, and then grew startled as though a strange voice had spoken with him. He often stammered in conversation; an indescribable fear came over him that he had forgotten the end of his sentence […].”

“The world he had once hoped to serve was severed by a monstrous gap; he had neither hatred, nor love, nor hope—only a dreadful void in himself, and a tremendous restlessness to fill it. He had nothing.”

“it’s boredom! Oh, this boredom! I scarcely know any more what to say; […] most people pray out of boredom, others fall in love out of boredom, some are virtuous, some vicious, and I am nothing, absolutely nothing! I don’t even want to take my own life: it would be too boring!”

“He grew quiet, perhaps almost lost in a dream; everything melted into a single line […]. […] It seemed to him he lay in an infinite sea that gently rose and fell. […] He sought out no way in particular.”

“In order to rid himself of his unending torment he anxiously grasped onto everything; at isolated moments he felt deeply how he was making excuses for everything; he treated himself as though he were a child who was sick.”

“One must love [humans] in order to penetrate the particular existence of each thing; there must be nothing too common, or too ugly. Only then can they be understood. The most insignificant of faces can make a deeper impression than the mere sensation of beauty.”

“The most beautiful pictures, the most swelling tones, form a group and then dissolve. Only one thing remains: an unending beauty which passes from one form to another, eternally revealed, eternally unchanged. […] we can’t always hold them fast and place them in museums and reduce them to manuscript paper”