Imagine a figure so colossal, so central to cultural
history, that he's basically the sun around which
an entire century of intellectual life revolved.
That's a great way to put it. We're talking about
someone who wasn't just a writer. I mean, sure,
he wrote the book that arguably created the concept
of the modern bestseller, and he wrote the drama
that defines a whole nation. But if you stop
there, you are missing... Like 80 % of the picture.
It really is a classic tip of the iceberg case,
isn't it? Because usually when we think of these
literary giants, we think of them, you know,
locked away in a room with a quill and ink, sort
of isolated from the world. Right. We don't picture
them dissecting elephant skulls or managing the
reopening of silver mines or commanding troops
during an invasion. Exactly. And that is the
journey we're going on today. We are looking
at a man who was so impressive that when Napoleon,
and this is Napoleon at the height of his power,
the master of Europe. When Napoleon met him,
he was completely starstruck. Utterly. He just
looked at him and said, vous êtes un homme. Which
means, you are a man. Yeah, but coming from Napoleon,
that was the ultimate compliment. It wasn't just,
you're a man. It was, you are a complete human
being. The full package. Today on the Deep Dive,
we're tackling the life, the science. Yes, the
science and the chaotic loves of Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe. And we've got a massive stack of
notes here we're pulling from biographical records,
historical accounts of his interactions with
people like Beethoven and Napoleon, and deep
summaries of his scientific work. Things like
his theory of colors and metamorphosis of plants.
And our mission here is really to understand
how one person can effectively embody an entire
cultural shift. The transition from the age of
reason to romanticism. He's often called the
German Shakespeare, but I think by the end you'll
see that label is almost too limiting. Oh, absolutely.
He was a polymath in the truest, most complete
sense of the word. A polymath who also happened
to be a bit of a rock star in his 20s. So let's
unpack this. We've got a roadmap for the discussion.
We're going to start with his early years and
the absolute scandal that was The Sorrows of
Young Werther. The book that made him famous
overnight. Then we're going to pivot to the part
that surprises most people. His career as a statesman
and kind of bizarrely. scientist which is where
things get really fascinating because he actually
claimed he was more proud of his color theory
than all of his poetry combined which sounds
completely insane but we will get to why he thought
that then we'll look at his time in Italy his
legendary friendship with Schiller and the wild
personal life involving his mistress turned wife
and some very rude French soldiers. The Spoon
Guards, a great story. And finally, we'll wrap
up with his legacy, his masterpiece Faust, and
the myths surrounding his death. It is a lot
of ground to cover, but every piece connects.
It forms a picture of a man who just refused
to be categorized. So let's jump in at the beginning.
Frankfurt, 1749. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is
born into what we would call a pretty comfortable
setup. Very comfortable. His father, Johann Caspar
Goethe, was an imperial counselor. He'd inherited
a huge fortune, lived in a large house, but he
was also a man with some thwarted ambitions.
He hadn't quite achieved the public status he
wanted. Ah, I know this dynamic. He poured all
of that energy into his children, especially
his son. The classic, I didn't make it so you
will thing? Precisely. And the education young
Gotha received was, well, it was intense. He
had private tutors for everything. We're not
just talking about one or two languages. We're
talking Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English,
and even biblical Hebrew. Just a casual six languages
before you're an adult. No big deal. And it wasn't
just book learning. He took lessons in dancing,
writing, and fencing. His father was meticulously
building a gentleman. A perfect product of the
Enlightenment. But there's this interesting little
detail about his family tree that often gets
overlooked. On his mother's side, the text mentions
he descended from the Solden family. Oh, I saw
this in the notes. This is the Oriental ancestor
theory. Right. There have been these claims,
or family legends, that his maternal grandmother's
lineage goes back to a Turkish officer. a man
named Sadak Sele Zoltan. And the story goes he
was captured during the Crusades. Sometime in
that era, yes. Captured, brought to Germany,
baptized, and eventually integrated into the
nobility. So the great prince of German poets
might have had roots reaching back to the Middle
East. That's fascinating. It's a really compelling
possibility, and it may be shed some light on
why later in life, Goethe showed such a profound
interest in the East and in Islam, which we'll
definitely touch on. But as a kid, his imagination
was fired up by something much closer to home.
Puppet shows. The French occupation, right? Yes.
During the Seven Years' War, French soldiers
actually occupied Frankfurt and were billeted
in the Goethe family home. Right, in his house.
And they put on these puppet shows, and young
Johann was just... Mesmerized. It seems trivial,
but this obsession with theater, with the mechanics
of storytelling, it seems to have started right
there. And it clearly stuck with him because
that whole puppet theater theme shows up years
later in his huge novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
But despite this obvious artistic spark, his
dad says, no, you're going to be a lawyer. Of
course. So off he goes to Leipzig University
in 1765, and he... absolutely hated it. He detested
memorizing the rules. I feel like that's a pretty
common theme with geniuses. They hate the rote
memorization part of education. He couldn't stand
it. He preferred attending poetry lectures, but
even then he was critical. He fell in love. He
wrote some cheerful Coco style verses, but he
was basically just avoiding his actual studies.
And then he gets sick. And this isn't just a
bad cold. The sources describe a major health
crisis. A hemorrhage. A very serious one. He
has to move back home to Frankfurt and he spends
about a year and a half just recovering. And
this seems like a real turning point. A huge
one. He's stuck in bed being nursed by his mother
and his sister, Cornelia, who he was very close
to. And he just reads. He dives into alchemy,
religion, mysticism. It's this intensely introspective
period that really deepens his thinking. So when
he finally recovers and goes to Strasbourg to
finish his law degree. He's a different person.
He is. And that's where he meets Johann Gottfried
Herder. Which is a crucial meeting. Absolutely
crucial. Herder is the one who really introduces
him to Shakespeare. And you have to understand
at this time in Germany, French culture was the
gold standard. It was the dominant high status
model. Herder and Goethe started looking at Shakespeare
and at German folk poetry, Volksbose, as something
more authentic, more raw and powerful. And this
is the birth. of the Sturm und Drang movement.
Storm and stress. It sounds like a teenage emo
band, but it was a serious literary movement.
It was. It was a full -blown reaction against
the dry rationalism of the Enlightenment. It
was all about high emotion, individualism, breaking
the rules, subjectivity, and Goethe, almost overnight,
becomes the poster child for it. And nothing
screams high emotion like the book that made
him a superstar, The Sorrows of Jungwerther.
Published in 1774, he was only 24 years old.
Okay, for anyone listening who hasn't read it,
give us the quick rundown. What is Werther all
about? It's an epistolary novel, which means
it's written as a series of letters. The protagonist,
Werther, is this very sensitive, very artistic
young man who falls desperately in love with
a woman named Lotte. The problem is? The problem
is, Lotte is already engaged to a very decent,
very steady, but kind of boring guy named Albert.
Of course. And Werther just can't handle the
intensity of his unrequited feelings. He spirals
into this deep depression, and eventually he
commits suicide by shooting himself. It sounds
incredibly dark, but the source material is clear
on this. Yeah. This was arguably the world's
first bestseller. It wasn't just popular. It
was a phenomenon. It was a contagion. And what
makes it so potent is that it was deeply semi
-autobiographical. This was based on his own
life. Very much so. Goethe really did fall for
a woman named Charlotte Buff, who was engaged
to another man, Johann Christian Kessner. And
around that same time, a friend of Goethe's,
a young man named Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem, actually
did kill himself over an unrequited love. So
Goethe takes his own feelings, his own heartbreak,
mixes them with his friend's very real tragedy,
and pours it all into this book. He famously
said he shot his hero to save himself. Exactly.
For him, writing it was cathartic. He purged
those suicidal feelings onto the page. But for
the rest of Europe, it had the opposite effect.
This became known as the Werther effect. People
started dressing like him, right? The Werther
costume. Yes. All across Europe, young men started
wearing a blue tailcoat with a yellow vest and
trousers. It became the uniform of the suffering
romantic soul. But it got darker than just a
fashion trend. Oh, much darker. There was a documented
spike. in copycat suicides. People were found
dead with copies of the book in their pockets.
It was so controversial that it was banned in
several places like Leipzig and Denmark. I mean,
that is wild. A book. Having that kind of direct
physical impact on society, it was seen as glorifying
suicide. It was. The novel ends with a funeral
that no clergyman attended, which was just shocking
for the time. It challenged the religious and
social order. And it made Goethe, at age 24,
instantly one of the most famous men in Europe.
Napoleon read it seven times. Seven times. He
carried it with him on his campaign in Egypt.
But here is the kicker. Goethe made almost no
money from it. Because copyright laws were basically
non -existent. Right. There were pirate editions
everywhere. He had all the fame, but almost none
of the fortune. But that fame was enough to get
him an invitation that would change his life
forever. Enter the Duke. Duke Carl August of
Sachs -Weimar -Eisenach. He was just 18 years
old, a young, enlightened ruler, and he invited
the famous author of Werther to his court in
Weimar in 1775. And Goethe basically never leaves.
He stays there for the rest of his life. But
this is where the story pivots from tortured
artist to something completely different. You'd
expect him to just sit around writing poems for
the Duke, but he gets a job. A real job. Several
jobs, actually. This is the statesman phase,
and it's kind of baffling. Goethe wasn't just
a court decoration. He was made a member of the
Duke's Privy Council. He was put in charge of
the War Commission. He was tasked with reopening
the silver mines in Ilmenau. He was even in charge
of road building. Wait, road building? The guy
who wrote the most emotional, heart -wrenching
novel of the century is now deciding where the
pavement goes. And taking it very, very seriously.
For a few years, he was effectively the prime
minister and the chancellor of the Exchequer.
He was running the day -to -day administration
of the entire duchy. Budgets, infrastructure,
military affairs. He was in the thick of it.
That's just a completely different skill set.
It is. But there is a darker side to this administrative
work, isn't there? The notes mention something
about mercenaries. Yes. And this is a controversial
point raised by the author Daniel Wilson. He
claims that as head of the War Commission. Goethe
was involved in negotiating the forced sale of
vagabonds, criminals, and political dissidents
to the British military. To fight in the American
Revolution. Exactly. The British needed bodies
to fight the American colonists, and many German
princes were selling their subjects as mercenaries
to fill that need. It was a source of income
for the state. So if this is true, it puts Goethe
in a position of treating human beings as, well,
as commodities, which sits very uneasily with
his reputation as a great humanist. It's a heavy
contradiction. But I guess that's part of the
complexity of the man. He wasn't just an observer
of life. He was a full participant in the machinery
of the state with all its moral compromises.
And speaking of observation, while he's running
the state, he starts doing something else that
baffled his contemporaries. He starts doing hard
science. And we are just talking about a casual
hobby. He was obsessed. He was. And this is the
part of the deep dive that is just so fascinating.
Goethe famously told his secretary, Eckermann,
that he took no pride in his poetry. He said,
and I'm paraphrasing here, excellent poets have
lived at the same time as me, but that in my
century, I'm the only person who knows the truth
in the difficult science of colors. Of that,
I am not a little proud. That is a massive claim.
I'm the only one in the entire century who gets
it. So what was his beef with the science of
color? Well, his main opponent was Isaac Newton.
So he's taking on Newton. Very bold. Newton,
as we all know, had demonstrated with his prism
that white light is composed of all the colors
of the spectrum. It's an analytic, mathematical
view of light. Goethe hated that. Why? What was
his objection? Goethe felt that by reducing color
to numbers and angles, mathematics killed the
phenomenon itself. He believed color wasn't something
hidden in light, but that it arose from the dynamic
interplay of light and darkness. Light and darkness.
Yes. He said color emerges when light and dark
interact through a turbid medium. So for Goethe,
yellow is what happens when you see light through
a slightly darkened medium, like the atmosphere
at sunrise. Blue is what happens when you see
darkness through a light -filled medium, like
the sky during the day. So scientifically. By
modern physics standards. By the standards of
physics, Newton was right and Goethe was wrong.
The math works. But, and this is a huge, but
Goethe wasn't really doing physics. He was doing
phenomenology. He was studying the physiological
experience of color. How the human eye perceives
it. Exactly. He described things like colored
shadows and after images with incredible precision.
Things Newton's theory completely ignored. His
work on the psychological effects of color, how
red feels agitating and blue feels calming, was
groundbreaking. It anticipated later theories
and deeply influenced painters like J .M .W.
Turner and philosophers like Wittgenstein. So
he was wrong about the physics, but right about
the perception. In a nutshell, yes. But his scientific
contributions didn't stop at light. He was also
a pioneer in biology. The Goethe bone. The intermaxillary
bone. In the 18th century, a key argument for
human exceptionalism was that humans lacked this
specific bone in the upper jaw, the intermaxillary
bone, which almost all other mammals had. It
was seen as a key anatomical difference distinguishing
us from animals. A physical sign of our special
status. Right. But Goethe didn't buy it. He was
a great comparative anatomist. He compared human
skulls, including a fetal skull, with an elephant
skull and other mammals. And in 1784, he found
it. He found the bone in humans. He did. It's
just that in humans, it fuses with the jawbone
very early in development, making it hard to
see. By proving we have the same bone structure,
he was providing powerful evidence for what we
now call homology, the idea that different species
share a common anatomical blueprint. That sounds
suspiciously like a step towards evolution. It
was a huge step. He didn't have the concept of
natural selection like Darwin would later, but
he absolutely saw nature as f***. fluid, dynamic,
and transforming. This connects directly to his
botany work. He wrote a whole treatise called
The Metamorphosis of Plants. What was the big
idea there? The big idea was... allicis blatt.
All is leaf. All is leaf. Even the flower, yes.
He argued that all the different parts of a plant,
the petals, the stamens, the sepals, are just
modified leaves. They're all variations on the
same underlying form. That's actually really
beautiful. It's a scientific theory that sounds
like a poem. It is poetic science. He called
it morphology. He was searching for the archetype.
the earthlands, or the primal plant from which
all other plants could be derived. He believed
if you looked closely enough, you could see the
unity in all of nature's variety. It's amazing
he had time for all this while basically running
a country and writing novels. But I guess the
pressure eventually got to him because in 1786,
he pulls a disappearing act. the Italian journey.
He had been in Weimar for 10 years, working constantly
in administration. He felt he was drying up artistically.
He was creatively burnt out. So without telling
almost anyone, he only told the Duke. Not even
his close platonic companion, Charlotte von Stein.
He just leaves. He ghosted. Essentially. He slips
out of town before dawn and travels to Italy
under a pseudonym. He goes to Rome, Naples, and
Sicily. And he has that famous quote about Sicily.
To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily
is to not have seen Italy at all. Right, because
in Sicily, he saw the Greek roots of Western
culture, the temples, the art. This trip completely
changed him. He went from the emotional storm
of verether to what we now call Weimar classicism.
He became obsessed with classical ideals of order,
balance, simplicity, and harmony. There's a bit
of a mystery about this trip though, right? A
gap in the records. There is. His journals have
a significant documented gap during his time
in Venice. Historians have speculated wildly
about what he was up to. Secret love affairs?
Maybe even some espionage for the Duke? But we
just don't know for sure. I love a good historical
mystery. But eventually he has to come back to
the real world, back to Weimar. And when he returns,
he starts what is probably the most important
friendship of his life. Friedrich Schiller. Now,
they didn't like each other at first, did they?
Not at all. They were wary rivals. Schiller was
the new hotshot of the Sturm und Drang movement,
a generation younger, and Goethe had kind of
moved on to his more formal classicist phase.
They saw each other as opposites. So what changed?
In 1794, they had a long conversation after a
science lecture, of all things, and they realized
their minds worked in perfect counterpoint. Goethe
was intuitive and observational. Schiller was
philosophical and abstract. Together, they were
more than the sum of their parts. It was a true
collaborative friendship. The best kind. Schiller
was the one who really pushed Goethe to finish
his major works. He'd say, you have to finish
Faust. They critiqued each other's work constantly,
relentlessly. They practically lived in each
other's pockets intellectually for a decade.
It's hard to imagine Goethe's later works without
Schiller's prodding. Speaking of living arrangements,
we really need to talk about Goethe's personal
life back in Weimar, because while he's hanging
out with Schiller and writing these high -minded
classical plays, his domestic situation was,
uh... Scandalous for the time. Very. He was living
openly with Christian Vulpius. She wasn't from
the nobility or the educated class. She worked
in a flower factory when they met. They weren't
married. They lived together for years and had
a son. And Weimar high society was not okay with
this. Not at all. They looked down on her. They
called her his fat half behind his back and considered
her an uneducated drunk. They ostracized her.
But she proves herself to be incredibly tough.
Which brings us to 1806. The year is 1806. Napoleon's
army has just crushed the Prussian forces at
the Battle of Jena -Auerstedt. They invade and
occupy Weimar. And this is where we get the story
of the Spoon Guards. Right. These were undisciplined
French soldiers, part of the Marauders, known
as Spoon Guards, because they were looting everything
they could, especially silverware. A few of them
break into Goethe's house. They get into his
wine cellar. They are drunk and aggressive. And
they burst into his bedroom with bayonets drawn.
Goethe was petrified. I mean, he's a 57 -year
-old intellectual, not a fighter. But Christiane,
she physically throws herself between him and
the soldiers. She argues with them, stands up
to them, and organizes the servants to barricade
the kitchen and cellar. She effectively saves
Goethe's life. That is a real ride -or -die partner
right there. Absolutely, and Goethe recognized
it. Just days later, after 18 years of living
together in sin, he takes her to a church and
marries her. He legitimized their relationship
primarily, it seems, to ensure her security and
legal standing after that terrifying night. It's
an incredible story. And speaking of the French
invasion, this leads us to the meeting with Napoleon
himself in 1808. This was at the Congress of
Erfurt. Napoleon, the emperor, summons Goethe.
Now, just picture this scene. Napoleon is the
most powerful man on the planet. He's conquering
kingdoms. But when he meets Goethe, he's the
fanboy. Because he'd read Werther seven times.
Yes. He apparently carried it with him on his
campaigns. They talk about literature and politics.
And that's when Napoleon looks him over and delivers
that famous line, Vous êtes un homme. You are
a man. He even awarded Goethe the Legion of Honor.
This must have put Goethe in a really tricky
spot, didn't it? Because at this time, German
nationalism is really starting to bubble up.
There's this intense hatred for the French occupiers.
Right. And people wanted Goethe, as the nation's
greatest writer, to write patriotic, anti -French
hate poetry. And he refused. Completely refused.
He considered himself a supranationalist, a citizen
of the world. He told Eckermann, how could I
write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? He
valued civilization and culture above national
borders. He said you can't hate a nation like
France that is among the most cultivated in the
world and to which he owed so much of his own
culture. That is a very modern, very cosmopolitan
perspective. But it probably did make him popular
with the German nationalists at the time. No,
it certainly didn't. But Goethe was always playing
the long game. And the longest game of all was
Faust. The masterpiece. It was his life's work,
literally. He started writing the first version,
the Urfaust. in his early 20s, around 1773. He
published part one in 1808, and he didn't seal
the manuscript for part two until 1832, just
before he died. He worked on it on and off for
60 years. Most people know the basic concept.
Faust sells his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles,
for knowledge and power and worldly pleasure.
But Goethe's version is much more nuanced than
that. It's a wager, not a simple sale. Faust
says to the devil, essentially, if you can ever
give me a moment of such pure satisfaction that
I say to that moment, linger a while, you are
so fair, then you can have my soul. So it's all
about the striving. As long as he keeps striving
and is never fully satisfied, he's safe. Exactly.
A key line is, man errs as long as he strives.
And? And? Randomly, a very specific scientific
discovery by Nikola Tesla. This is one of my
favorite connections in all of history. Tesla
had memorized the entire text of Faust in the
original German. He was walking through a park
in Budapest, reciting the sunset speech from
Faust, and suddenly, in a flash of insight, he
visualized the rotating magnetic field. No way.
Yes. That moment of reciting poetry led directly
to the invention of the AC motor, which literally
powers our modern world today. That is incredible.
The power of poetry literally... leading to electric
power. It just shows the interconnectedness of
all knowledge, which is what Goethe's whole life
is about. So we're moving into his later years
now. He's a legend. He's an institution, the
Olympian of Weimar. But he's still Goethe, which
means he's still falling in love. And it gets
a little uncomfortable here. In 1821, after surviving
a serious heart illness, the 72 -year -old Goethe
falls head over heels for a young woman named
Ulrich von Levitzow. Who was? How old? 17. Yikes,
yeah. That's a 55 -year age gap. It is, and he
was serious. He actually wanted to marry her.
He asked the Grand Duke to act as a go -between
and make the proposal on his behalf. And your
mother said... Absolutely not, I assume. Correct.
Her mother politely but firmly declined. The
marriage never happened. Goethe was completely
crushed by the rejection. But being Goethe. Being
Goethe, he channeled that heartbreak directly
into art. On the carriage ride home, he wrote
The Merry and Bad Elegy, which is considered
one of his finest, most personal, and most tender
poems. It's that classic tortured artist trope,
again, even at 72. But he wasn't just chasing
teenagers. He was also mentoring the next generation.
He had a famous meeting with a young Felix Mendelssohn.
Yes, the composer. Mendelssohn was an incredible
prodigy, just 12 years old at the time. Now,
Goethe had a unique basis for comparison because
he had actually heard the seven -year -old Mozart
play decades earlier. So he'd seen the two greatest
child prodigies in music history. What did he
say? He told his music advisor, Zelter, that
while Mozart's playing was miraculous, Mendelssohn's
improvisation bore the same relation to Mozart's
as the cultivated talk of a grown -up person
bears to the prattle of a child. Wow. He put
Mendelssohn above Mozart. That is incredibly
high praise. It shows that even in his old age,
he was still engaging with the new generation
of genius. He wasn't stuck in the past. Let's
talk about his worldview in these later years.
We talked about his possible ancestry and his
interest in Islam earlier. Where did he ultimately
land on religion? It's complex. He was born Lutheran,
but his contemporaries often called him the Great
Heathen. He really distanced himself from organized
Christian theology. He once called church history
a hodgepodge of mistakes and violence. But he
wasn't an atheist. No, not at all. He seems to
have been more of a pantheist or a free thinker.
He believed in a divine presence in nature, very
much in the vein of Spinoza. But he had some
very specific dislikes. In one of his Venetian
epigrams, he listed the four things he hated
most in the world. I have the list here. It's
fantastic. Number one, tobacco smoke. Two. Which
is a pretty shocking thing to include on a list
for a European intellectual in the 19th century.
He explained that he disliked the cross as a
symbol because he felt it obsessively focused
on the suffering and death of Jesus rather than
his life and teachings. And he continued to look
east for inspiration. He did. He wrote The Westeastern
Divan, a whole collection of poems inspired by
the 14th century Persian poet Hafez. He was trying
to create a dialogue between the Orient and the
Occident. And even in his youth, he wrote a powerful
poem called Muhammad's Gesang, or... muhammad's
song which portrays the prophet as this elemental
natural force just reinforces that citizen of
the world vibe he cultivated he really was he
saw value in all great cultures so we come to
the end march 22nd 1832 githa dies of heart failure
in weimar he's buried in the ducal vault right
next to schiller yeah we have to address the
famous last words More light. It's just perfect,
right? The great thinker of the Enlightenment
asking for more illumination as he fades into
the dark. It's perfect symbolism, a perfect end
to the story, but the reality is probably a little
more mundane. Okay, ruin it for us. What really
happened? Well, for one, the doctor who reported
it, Carl Vogel, wasn't actually in the room when
he died. Other accounts suggest he was just uncomfortable
in the dim room. He might have actually said,
open the second shutter so that more light comes
in. So he literally just wanted someone to open
the window. Probably. The historian Thomas Carlyle's
version is even more blunt. Open the shutters
so I can get more light. But in the end, does
it really matter? The myth captured the essential
truth of his life's work. That's a great point.
He was a man who spent his entire life fighting
against darkness and obscurity. He spent his
life trying to shed light on everything, from
the bones in our face to the colors of the rainbow
to the deepest corners of the human soul. So
his legacy is undeniable. Ralph Waldo Emerson
listed him as one of just six representative
men of all humanity, right up there with Plato
and Shakespeare. And today we have the Goethe
-Institut promoting German culture all over the
world. His influence runs through Hegel, through
Jung, through whole schools of philosophy and
science. He really does bridge the gap. He's
the link between the age of reason and the age
of romanticism. After all of this, what does
it all mean for us? What's the final thought
here? I think the most provocative takeaway from
Goethe comes from a line in Faust. Action is
the beginning of everything. Goethe didn't just
think, he did. He didn't stay in his lane. Exactly.
We live in an age of hyper -specialization. You're
a coder or you're a writer or you're a financial
analyst. Goethe would have rejected that completely.
He was a poet who needed to understand granite.
He was a lover who needed to understand tax administration.
He believed it was all connected. So here's the
question for you, the listener. If the man who
wrote the greatest drama in the German language
also spent months staring at rock samples and
elephant skulls just to find the truth, what
connections are we missing in our own lives by
categorizing things too strictly? What could
you discover if you just stepped out of your
designated lane? Something to think about. Thanks
for diving deep with us on Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe. It's been a pleasure. Until next time.