This blog is where I dump my brain from time to time just in case setting these thoughts free into the wild will be of interest or benefit to others.
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Thanks,
Robin
It is all an allegory to convey something that, no matter what form it is given, can never be adequately expressed. Only the transitory can be described; but what we feel and surmise but will never attain (or experience as an actual event), in other words, the intransitory that lies behind all experience, that is indescribable. That which draws us by its mystic force, that which every created thing…feels with absolute certainty at the very center of its being, that which Goethe here—again using an image—calls the Eternal Feminine—that is to say, the resting-place, the goal, as opposed to striving and struggling toward the goal (the eternal masculine)—that is the force of love, and you are right to call it by that name. There are countless representations and names for it…Goethe himself reveals it stage by stage, on and on, in image after image, more and more clearly as he draws nearer the end…[H]e presents it with ever greater clarity and certainty right up to the appearance of the Mater Gloriosa, the personification of the Eternal Feminine.
– Mahler on Faust, the subject of his 8th Symphony, 1909