When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was. - Daniel J. Boorstin

Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.

Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.

In the age of pseudo‑events it is less the artificial sim­plification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us. Whenever in the public mind a pseudo‑event competes for attention with a spontaneous event in the same field, the pseudo‑event will tend to dominate. What happens on television will overshadow what happens off television.

Plato's Academy, formally organized as a religious guild, had the aura of a great spirit reaching out to all listeners. But Aristotle's legacy was a body of knowledge, marking the path of modern learning-accumulating the facts of the world and human experience with an explanation of causes. Aristotle's legacy, then, was not the power of a charismatic personality of grand poetic gifts, but rather the accumulation of a lifetime of scholarly observation. And before Aristotle's writings were recovered by Andronicus, there were centuries of opportunity for his ideas to be distorted. Plato's was an unbroken tradition, Aristotle's was a series of renaissances.