Wer nie sein Brot ...

I found my copy of Goethe's poems among the books as we were unpacking and brought it back to Birkenhead, so, again, I find myself, as I did when I was sixteen. reading the text as I listen to the Schubert. How could I have thought when I was sixteen that I should be returning to this over forty years later, the same songs. I can hardly recall what the significance of these words might have been to me then, they must have referred, I must have referred them, to the usual adolescent anguish, which, nevertheless, they seemed to address and speak to, in all the particulars of common experience. But the poem still speaks to the life of someone in their early sixties, though one refers them, they refer to, a different range and order of experience and this fact is what makes it a poem at all:

Wer nie sein Brot mit Traenen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Naechte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Maechte

Anyone who has never eaten their bread in tears, or sat weeping on their bed in nights of grief, does not know you, heavenly powers

It is in extremis, I suppose, that the parties to religious dispute part company, or it is rather in their assessment of what it is to be in extremis. Out of this grief comes recognition of something we are not normally acquainted with ... In this grief we console ourselves with pictures and illusions .... ? Are there two possibilities here or only one? The moot point, though, is how we characterise the nature of the grief, and whether the perspective that it sometimes opens up genuinely matches the phenomenology of consolation: what is the case, not what must be assumed to be the case.

But the talk of 'heavenly powers' ... it is tempting to say that we have, are saddled with, a prior system of belief within whose framework we make sense of the impact on us of our grief and anguish, if that is where we are starting from. And given the collapse of that system ... I certainly feel some sympathy with this, except that I am also inclined to think that the 'system of belief' arises out of the experience and then becomes solidified and no longer the poetry of our intimations. This happens already to some extent in the second stanza of the poem:

Ihr fuehrt ins Leben uns hinein
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden
Dann ueberlasst ihr ihn der Pein:
Denn alle Schuld raecht sich auf Erden

You lead us into life, and allow the wretched to become guilty and given over to suffering: for every guilt is revenged on this earth.

Only the last line says something that could be derived from experience, the sense of karma, that what we do will come back to haunt us. And sometimes this is true. there really are consequences of actions, but not always ... or at least, that is not something we know.