Extract

All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

An aging scholar, suffocated by the limits of human knowledge, wagers his soul with a devil who promises the one thing books cannot provide: a moment so perfect he will beg it to stay. Goethe labored over this verse drama for nearly sixty years, from the first drafts of his youth to the mystical second part completed just before his death in 1832, and it became the cathedral of German literature, vast enough to contain lyric poetry, political allegory, classical mythology, and the restless modern spirit that refuses satisfaction. Faust's bargain is the bargain of Western civilization: the wager that striving justifies everything, even damnation. The poem answers with redemption, but only barely, and only at the last.