I

Sage mir,
   Was mein Herz begehrt?

Mein Herz ist bei dir,
   Halt es wert.

—By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

II

A
My flatmate came over this afternoon; I hadn't seen him since he left town to visit his girlfriend in VA. Since they're renovating the kitchen and the girlfriend called last night, he was here also on her behalf to see whether the job was going appropriately. She likes the greenish 1940s-era linoleum floor and hopes it is not changed; he despises it. She has never wanted new cabinets in the kitchen, especially not ones on the walls; he thinks they're a good idea and will provide more storage space. I doubt the floor will be replaced, but the cabinets are being installed. He and I see eye-to-eye on the cabinets (and with/to them, since we're about the same height); she'll just have to deal.

His brief visit became longer and longer, for we talked about our dissertations and spent time especially talking about Leibniz, the Stoics, Kant, and particles as points in physics. Point particles are a concept that's hard to get across to some people. Somehow we ended up seated in the living room discussing television and movies and 1980s toys and cartoons. His internet privileges in the dorm have been temporarily suspended due to hitting a transfer/download cap. He wondered whether I had a digital copy of the graphic novel adaptation of Alien. I knew I did, and he went to the attic to find his German print copy, but I had a hard time finding my version, for I kept looking in my collection of Marvel publications, specifically the Marvel Super Special title, which featured their Kiss! stories and numerous movie adaptations (Octopussy, both Conan movies and Dune, and so on), but then I realized, as did he, that Alien was too bloody for Marvel. Heavy Metal had put it out as a book.

Along with his German version of Alien he brought down a German/Swiss version of Franquin's Schwarze Gedanken or “Black Thoughts.”

B
I lied.

I stayed with Goethe, and not just Goethe, but a short piece from the West-Eastern Divan. These handful of lines begin the “Book of Love.” As the Hamburg Edition (volume 2, page 592) points out, this little verse first appeared in the Ausgabe letzter Hand, Goethe's “Director's Cut” version of his works that he worked on in the late 1820s. The Hamburg edition continues that the literature doesn't really deal with this short verse, but that it's not unproblematic.

It is not composed of even feet, which is to say, it's not the syllables that are important but the number of feet, which are not all the same length. The number of accented syllables, though, remains rather constant. One question is whether these are four two-foot verses or two four-foot verses just artificially broken (notice the indentation). This is a bit inconsequential in the end.

The part that is a bit more interesting or problematic is that this poem doesn't appear in any documents handwritten by Goethe, only in the printed version and in a manuscript written by Goethe's secretary at the time, Johann August Friedrich John, and as many people have noted, John's transcriptions were often riddled with errors. Goethe's “motto verses” were designed to be clear and concise, and while this one is concise it's not clear. A question is posed but the second set of lines does not answer but seems almost a non sequitur. One suggestion is that instead of mein in the second verse it should read dein: “Tell me what your heart desires?” Then we would have a question-and-answer in two voices.

C
Today's music was the conclusion of Dvorak, Franck, and now Grieg. I'd covered Elgar already due to the vagaries of iTunes.

I cannot quite say I was “raised” as a classical musician, for there were no musicians in my family, but from an early age I was trained as a classical pianist and later I added the violin and the viola, switching from the former to the latter because of matters of size. I first encountered César Franck's works during my childhood when I dealt with a simplified piano adaptation of his sonata for violin and piano in a minor. That's also how I encountered Saint-Saëns, since it was a matter of simplified piano transcriptions of orchestral works. By the time I could have played Franck on the violin I had moved to the viola, which had a more limited repertoire.

It's a gorgeous and melancholy work; even when it is upbeat it is not playful. When I was in college one of my better friends, a flautist, performed the Franck sonata as a flute and piano piece; the violin version, though, was still my preferred interpretation.

I had my first teaching assignment senior year. A rule we all know to observe is not to get involved with your students, but that didn't stop me from falling hard for someone who was intelligent, interesting, and far out of my league. I hadn't even noticed her until a friend of mine, A, and I were sitting at the campus grill one afternoon enjoying shakes and fries when she walked through and my friend commented on her.

I worked in the language lab and she and another student often came by; they had German with the same professor who taught the seminar I TA-ed, and they had listening activities to do for their language course. Her friend was the nice member of a large Mormon family; her older brother was in my class and had been a nuisance in my first math course—he consistently relied on his partners for his homework answers and never contributed anything to the work groups. We often found ways to ditch him. It was all very middle school.

We had a language dorm, where I had once lived, and the dining hall there served only lunch and focused on specific language tables. Students in language courses were required to attend at least once a week, I believe, and so I ran into my student there several times, and we tended to share lunch at deserted tables.

I knew that my interest was unrequited and that 21 year old me was of little interest to 18 or 19 year old her, so I left it at that and tried to ignore and forget her, though I was hindered in this endeavor by “friends” acting as little pitchfork-wielding devils on my shoulder. Toward the end of the semester she gave me a mix-tape of sorts containing a variety of flute works as performed by a Baroque music group in Germany; she'd stayed there a few weeks and her host-family was involved in the group. While Franck is hardly a Baroque composer that didn't stop the group from performing his sonata. There was no list of the works on the cassette; the Franck is the only one I can identify.

The next semester she was no longer my student. Even today when I hear that sonata my heart drops a bit lower than the music on its own can cause.

III

Tell to me
   What my heart does crave?

My heart is with thee,
   Keep and save.

—Translated by John Whaley