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Epilogue: Three Anniversaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Summary
Möcht' ich ein Komet seyn? Ich glaube.
[Would I like to be a comet? I think so.]
— Hölderlin, “In lieblicher Bläue” (In lovely blueness)THE JUBILEE OF A RENOWNED CULTURAL FIGURE may be likened to the long-expected appearance of a comet in the night sky. Much as the comet's approach transforms astronomy, however briefly, from a boffinish pursuit into a popular pastime, so the commemoration of an author ordinarily discussed by none but academics has the potential to bring him to the attention of a much broader reading public. As each celestial body shoots into view, it excites a flush of interest conditioned by the knowledge that decades may elapse before it again blazes across the firmament. Luther, Bach, and Nietzsche years follow one another in regular succession, observed with a solemnity that stands in inverse proportion to the arbitrariness of the occasion. Conferences are held, biographies published, and works reissued in accordance with the divinely prescribed calendar; appreciations and reevaluations appear by the dozen. Every so often a new comet emerges from the cosmic flotsam, or an old comet, hitherto unnoticed, veers closer to the earth in the course of its journey through the solar system.
Today comets give rise to different associations in the spectator than in the age of Hölderlin, who was not alone in regarding their elliptical trajectory — at once predetermined, aberrant, and dazzling to behold — as a figure of revolution.
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- Hölderlin after the CatastropheHeidegger - Adorno - Brecht, pp. 194 - 214Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008