Sometimes when I’m sitting I’ll remember Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and the images of him explaining and boring everyone to sleep about his story, about how he was a child and his parents put on a little puppet show and how he fell in love with theater from this, how he learned all of the plays and stories just to play with his puppets and the passion and just pure love for the art he explained,

For me In that I saw a love of knowledge and aesthetic beauty and skill that I honestly wish to see in real people but often they come short.


 Sometimes I think about the character and how he struggled to reconcile his love with the facts of his life.

The moments that ring out the most strongly to me are the discussions between him and his business minded best friend, first he describes Art as a beautiful goddess, decked in jewels and so forth and to him business seems as if a old and pointless hag. To which his friend replies it is not so, wealth is a goddess who wears true gold, real pearls, all of her jewels are true and how she provides for the material existence of man.

This contradiction in nature pushing him forward isn’t handled in the way an inferior work would, by either giving him great success in the arts or just the value of wealth, no rather the struggle of these two keeps with him even when he finds some success as a player, in the words of Jarno, The man’s a bad actor and can only play characters who reflect him, at which point you can hardly call that acting. And oddly I identified very much with the coldness of Jarno, his will to help others while also being honest and yet manipulative. I think the tower society itself is a bit of an intoxicating idea, a group dedicated to nurturing the interior beauty of the soul and locating this by allowing ones natural virtues to develop and shine with subtle assistance. (Hell, I wrote a novella basically as a love letter to all of this. Kek. If you have any interest I’ll link it. )


I remember the two friends arguing, and him trying to convince his father that he should be a player. Honestly, when his father died I felt conflicted about the weakness of his character that he did not mourn more and continued on, and that is why I say this is so alive: when you can despise the actions and way of a character you love as you would a human you know that is absolutely the highest mark of success.

I remember him moving out and dedicating his time to business, the celebration he saw as he entered a little town, how mignon danced for him, how the old Jewish looking man played for him also. I remember mignon’s Song, even his other best friend who despised women. I remember mignon’s death and the funeral for her. Honestly the tragedy of his love life conjoint with the weakness of Will is, I believe justified and becomes satisfying by the ending of him embracing his son. I honestly would have ended the apprenticeship with the tower society telling him of his son and giving him his papers.

All In all, I even found the prose very enjoyable, but perhaps it’s because to me everything takes a back seat in the story to the depth of the characters, the living life of the world and brilliance of Goethe’s thought concerning Art, life and the soul.