Everything Is Magical

Sometimes I dream that I encounter a house on one of my walks through the neighborhood where I live: an old, stately, two story place surrounded by a garden.  Inside the house I find members of the League, the populace of a new golden age, a place of universal poesy.  There are ongoing discussions about botany and art, philosophy and the spirit.  A musician plays a folk tune on a fiddle.  An urban Rosenhaus.  I have not found such a place, but on the wall of the house on Arizona Street with a porch full of cats, passion vines are growing.  I passed by about a month ago, and the unmistakable, impossible passion flowers were blooming.  I had no idea that passion vines would grow in our climate.  Now the vines are covered with green fruit.  The yard of the house next door is filled with huge clusters of quartz crystals, dozens of them, gleaming in the late day sun.

     I never cease to be amazed by Novalis' Hymnen an Die Nacht.  It takes me to a place like the house that I am searching for.  It exists as a world unto itself.  I can only borrow Harry Haller’s words and say, “A work of such plenitude and power has never since arisen among men.”  That Novalis was in his twenties when he wrote it is perhaps what astounds me the most.  I remember writing a novel when I was twenty and being very satisfied with myself and my own genius.  Then, one evening, I attended a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  What shame, to be in the presence of real genius.  It was a cruel humiliation, a lesson not to be misconstrued.  I was not a genius at twenty, and it is no loss to anyone that the novel I wrote did not survive.  How does one explain Novalis, dead before thirty?  Or the original recipient of Harry Haller’s comment, Mozart?  How did Thomas Mann, in his mid-twenties, write such a true and insightful depiction of a mid-life crisis in Buddenbrooks?  I am glad now that I was not a genius at twenty.  Everything Thomas Mann wrote after Buddenbrooks seems a straining to surpass that one perfect achievement.   I continue to hope for the magic house as I walk the neighborhood.  Novalis wrote:  Alles ist Zauberei oder nichts (Everything is magical or nothing).