goethe’s faust

just started reading a translation of ‘faust’ by howard brenton and already found two excerpts that are simply perfect, both from the character of the director:

“I get sick of art,
I get sick
Of breaking my heart
With ambiguity and difficulty”

“What’s the point
Of highly wrought but thin,
Bitterly complex
Plays for the few?”

FAUST

“All I know is that we know
Nothing, and it burns
My heart.”

ANOTHER CITIZEN

“It’s a definition of civilisation,
To walk in the park on a Sunday
And talk of far away atrocities:
The human tragedies
Of foreign wars.
To be civilised is to be born, well … here,
And nowhere near
The Balkans, Russia, Eastern Turkey.”

MEPHISTOPHELES

“Is ‘wholeness’ all?
Humanity
Is a little world of fools
That thinks it’s whole;
I, in contrast, am a model of modesty:
I know I am part of a part
Of the darkness,
The great nothing
That, at the moment of creation,
Gave birth to light;
Hated light, blazing in celebration
Of victory over Mother Night.
But I give you a paradox:
For light to blaze,
Matter must burn
And die;
Matter blocks
The eternal life of light.
Soon
Both matter and light will die;
The universe will darken
And the kingdom of night return.”

MEPHISTOPHELES

“Totality is a hopeless project.
We’ve been chewing totality
For thousands of years,
And it’s stale bread, stale bread;
Unachievable by man or devil.
Believe me:
Don’t bother.
The wholeness of reality
Is strictly for God.
He lives in eternal light,
We devils in eternal night;
As for your kind
You find
Wholeness is denied;
You are divided;
Both light and dark
Struggle inside of you.”