Word: eckermann
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Silence on the Pedestal. It was this breadth of vision and unity of spirit, plus a high scorn for the battles of the metaphysicians, that aroused the indignation of German pedants and specialists. "People were never thoroughly contented with me," Goethe confided in his last years to Johann Peter Eckermann, the youth who was to become his Boswell. "[They] always wished me otherwise than it has pleased God to make me ... People expected from me some modest expression, humbly setting forth the total unworthiness of my person and my work ... I believed in God and in Nature...
...Paris. Mrs. Joyce hated the Paris alertes, but Joyce could not stand the tranquillity of village life. They returned to St. Gérand-le-Puy for Joyce's birthday (Feb. 2), remained until the end of March. Joyce took long walks, read Goethe's conversations with Eckermann, occasionally went to a movie. He also read all the newspapers, though he would discuss politics only with close friends. Shortly before the time the Nazis moved to Norway, the Joyces moved to Vichy...
...Conversations with Eckermann" is a Boswellian work in which the true personality of Goethe is presented by means of an assiduous recording of his conversations and actions on the part of the humble Eckermann. As in Boswell Eckermann consciously plays the fool at times in order to set off the admirable qualities of his subject. However he rarely intrudes his own personality into the work and the reader is left with a feeling of intimate acquaintance with the man Goethe. The republication of a long inaccessible volume on a man of such a rich and varied character as that...
...Testament he says: "One might hesitate to liken it to any modern work of the first credibility, such as Boswell's Johnson or Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe, but it is certainly quite as sound as Parson Weems' Life of Washington or Uncle Tom's Cabin." His concluding remarks are a typical piece of Menckenian irony: he describes a hanging he once reported, at which the Baptist prisoner loudly recited the 23d Psalm while the sheriff and the hangman were busied with the final preparations; the fall of the drop cut short the prisoner...