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ISBN 978-0-9749680-5-6
"Botanical Monument" by Paul Klee. 1928. Ink on paper with glue, mounted on board. 26.5/27 cm x 30.4 cm. Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Bern Museum of Art.
"Demony" by Paul Klee. 1925. Ink on paper mounted on board. 24.7/25.1 cm x 55.4 cm. Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Bern Museum of Art.
"Completed" by Paul Klee. 1927. Ink on paper mounted on board. 25 cm x 46 cm. (Location unknown.)Novalis is one of the towering figures of German Romanticism. The Novices of Sais is a Romantic meld of poetry, philosophy, and transcendental journey. Revolutionary yet profoundly simple at once, Novalis' reverence for the natural world pours out of every page. Translated into French in 1925, it was embraced by artists and poets alike and is often quoted by the Surrealists. Paul Klee's drawings were inspired by this visionary exploration of the inner life of modern humankind.
There is much to parse and contemplate here, and so tightly grained and subtle are Novalis’s arguments, so pointed his portraits of the novices, so crystalline the details he limns, that his enchanted prose poem yields new insights with each reading. Novalis’s lustrous style and penetrating vision call to mind the books of W. G. Sebald, another writer whose work is at once mythic, philosophical, and acutely attuned to the living world.
"—Speakeasy
In his brief 29 years on earth, Novalis asked the questions heard in age-old mystery schools and his poems and poetic thinking lifted the inner life of the modern soul to new dominions. He is a founding spirit for the works of the likes of Rilke, Hesse, Heidegger and Celan, among many others, and this grand meditation on Nature reveals him at his finest.
"—Jack Hirschman
1 Reader comment
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The Novices of Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen are two works by Novalis that are very important to me.I was aware of *The Novices of Sais* long before it was published in translation by archipelago. I vainly searched for out of print translations. I e-mailed someone at Dedalus, asking them to publish a translation. (Dedalus does much important German lit.) So, as I've liked to claim about other German works that appear in print now in the U.S., I feel I conjured this translation.
The work is poetic. It goes into the difficult, antithetical aspect of human reason, and how to deal with that problem. Both naturalism and antinaturalism are embraced.
There is a passage that could very well have inspired Wagner's notion of gesamptkunstwerke. "...he heard, saw, touched and thought at once."
He is fleshing out Goethe's naturalism. As God mellows with time (and disappears); nature mellows--
"...then the sun will lay down her harsh scepter."
Caves are important in *The Novices*, as they are in *Heinrich von Ofterdingen*. They are tranformation places; alchemical transformations take place there. (In Hermann Broch's *The Spell*--the mine) Metals were thought to grow underground through "telluric forces". (Alchemy is about human transformation.)
Novalis' mention of the "world soul" reminds us of Fechner, who may have been influenced by Novalis as he developed a conception of the earth that is along the lines of what we now call "gaia".
The last admonition is great advice for anyone, especially artists:
"...he who feels an inner calling to impart the understanding of nature to other men, to develop and cultivate this gift in men, must first give careful regard to the natural causes of this development and endeavor to learn the elements of this art from nature. Having thus gained an insight he will devise a system based on experiment, analysis and comparison, whereby these means may be applied by any individual; this system will become like second nature to him and then he will embark with enthusiasm upon his rewarding task."