Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, even on All Souls’ Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I don’t regret the direction of my life and academic pursuits, even though I know how futile it arguably all was. When I look at the ecology of humanities scholarship, I see all the wasted energy and the vain longing for recognition or impact. I know the doomed passion of the young scholar. I know the elation of learning, discovery, and innovation. I know the crushing disappointment. My career is an ideal case study of the sadness and futility of literary scholarship. Nevertheless, I do not regret it. Why is that?
The literature I read, loved, and researched gave meaning to life and made me aware of the complexity of the world. I thought that by making sense of its strangeness, I could craft the meaning of life and find the key to remaking it. Kafka’s Castle was “the last bastion of the mystery of existence,” as Ferlinghetti put it. Bertolt Brecht forged weapons of the spirit for turning the world upside down and right side up. Was he too subtle and difficult for those he sought to enlighten? Enlightenment is not obliterated by callous ignorance. There have always been those who stood apart and resisted the ways of the world. I resolved to take my stand with them to the end.
The discoveries I made seemed momentous to me at the time, but they interested hardly anyone, not even in the academy. For example, I documented that the strange quests and encounters that haunt the narrations of Kafka were based on the legal and contractual situations that preoccupied him as a labor lawyer and worker’s insurance official. The uncanny and surreal was rooted in the banal common experience, which we shunned as academics and ignored as refined souls. I had departed my banal middle-class origins, only to circle back and see them in greater depth and in need of transformation. (See my youthful article and my essay published in Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, Heft88 (15. Dezember 1983): S. 320-35).
In mid-career, between the ages of 39 and 45, I made use of my windfall earnings from directing academic programs abroad (earnings magnified by the overvalued dollar of the Reagan era and a tax break designed for corporate bigwigs but available to academic peons like myself). For a total of five free years, I lived the life of an independent intellectual. I was Descartes and Spinoza in Amsterdam, Montaigne in his tower retreat. I pursued a project that seemed both to underlie and span the fissures of my life and to coincide with some of the greatest questions of literature and intellectual history: how to understand the relation of religious authority and social history, epitomized by the clash of mysticism with reason or common sense. I approached this by reading and rereading in context the intractable writings of the so-called German mystics, looking for the historical crises of authority that led to their leap of faith and burst of imagination.
I wrote a number of monographs setting out my results. To relatively little effect. Perhaps the tone of my writing was too personal for the academic and too skeptical for the spiritually inclined. Or perhaps I simply shared the fate of almost all academic books by holding forth on the center stage of an empty theater. It’s likely that I fell between the two stools, between the authoritarian and the rational-skeptical sides of our increasingly polarized mentalities. To my credit, I lost no time licking wounds or bemoaning my fate. I knew that I shared it with others of my temperament. Instead, I applied my efforts in recent years to the modest and tradition-oriented tasks of translation and critical edition. Let the inquiring minds of the future approach these writings and decide for themselves! In a concluding word summing up and generalizing my findings, I put my experience and insights in the context of an underestimated current of anticlerical and anti-academic (or extra-academic) thinkers in German intellectual history which, in my opinion, casts a revealing and surprising light on much of the history of German literature and thought. Such figures as the archetypal Dr. Faust were probably not at all what they seemed to the conformist German academic establishment. I summed up my findings in two critical briefs.
Now, after stuffing my message into a bottle and submitting it to the waves of time, I rest my case without regrets.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 