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On Friedrich von Hardenberg
On teachers
On Mathematics
On love
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I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think of nothing else. Friedrich von Hardenberg
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I want to share key passages with you from a lesser-known British writer and how the book left me after I read the final pages.
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote her first book when she was 58 years old and went on to publish nine novels, three biographies and myriad other writings. She had a notable literary lineage as one of the first women students at Oxford, a father who was editor of Punch and a grandfather who was an eminent Anglican priest and scholar.
Fitzgerald chronicles the period of courtship and the true story of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) in what many feel is her masterpiece, The Blue Flower. The poet will meet his short-lived beloved, an ordinary girl, a “dullard” by his own family’s measure. He adores her nonetheless, the 12-year-old Sophie von Kuhn.
No one can understand the poet’s love for Sophie. But what can any of us say of love and love’s choice?
In addition to writing about the budding relationship, the book is a study of German life in the late 1700s and opens with a scene on washday. This occurred three times a year, with inventory of eighty-nine shirts along with heaps of linens and garments flowing from the upper windows of the estate in “great dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillow-cases, vests, bodices” and on.
You have a sense of the writing from page one: spare yet full of potent details, each word chosen and each sentence artfully arranged. The wash needs cleaning, maybe we too need cleaning, or a cleansing of our minds, of what is dated, dirty, or dingy.
I chose these quotes because they press on my own beliefs.
ON TEACHERS
My teachers did not agree with each other, my friends did not agree with the teachers, Fritz thought, but that is only on a superficial level, they were men of intellect and passion, let me believe in them all. (The Blue Flower, p.58-59)
This rang true of what I learned from teachers and others in my own life, of the discord and the harmony. And, I admire how the poet graciously believes in them all: his teachers and his friends.
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ON MATHEMATICS
All human knowledge is one. Mathematics is the linking principle, just as Ritter told me that electricity is the link between body and mind. Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language. And if all knowledge was to be expressed through symbols, then he must set out to work to write down every possible way the operation could be performed. (p. 65)
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‘Algebra, like laudanum*, deadens pain,’ Fritz wrote. ‘But the study of algebra has confirmed for me that philosophy and mathematics, like mathematics and music, speak the same language.” (p.271)
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As a student of mathematics and music and writing, I find beauty in form and structure and the poet’s idea of a common grammar or language, especially in poetry and the softer subjects. Such a sense of the whole and the artful shaping of a work, like the elegance of a mathematical proof, continue after the last page or the last line or the last note. The songs and themes play on, arising again the next week, or the next year.
Who has said it better than this, Algebra deadens pain!? How true, that the tedium of any field whether mathematics or writing, that is the essential part and even the major part of the job, algebra/tedium deadens the pain because to do so is to lose oneself in the numbers and variables, in the conceptional reduced to the essential, in the words and sentences.
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ON LOVE
‘If we are going to spend our lives together,’ he said, ‘I should like to learn everything about you.’ (p.102)
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Third, and last, is a love that speaks to commitment. How quaint, how old-fashioned. And, how refreshing to make the decision of a lifetime. The poet was optimistic. Yearning to start immediately was to learn everything he could about his Sophie, because as Fate would have it, they would have but a few years.
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Sophie in some ways was the poet’s blue flower. Hardenberg was both poet and intellectual, who moved in circles with the great minds of the era. His match to Sophie is a shock to friends and family. He wrote of the blue flower, a philosphical ideal of the infinite, the enigmatic, and ultimately the unattainable.
The two are not married because Sophie dies at age 15 from consumption. And, she leaves a lasting impression on Hardenberg who begins to write under the lesser-known family name of Novalis.
The blue flower is often associated with the romantic movement. In this book, it embodies what Hardenberg hoped to discover and Fitzgerald’s book is in its own way, a blue flower.
Sophie reminded me of Edgar Alan Poe’s young bride, Virginia, who he married when she was around the same age. She lived until 24, so they had a decade together, before she too died of Tuberculosis. The parallels are strong, with the death of a loved one influencing the verse and output of both men.
I finished the book and set it down, letting the ideas percolate.
Maybe I am in search of my own blue flower, though it may be called by another name. It is unattainable, a mystical summit of the mind, of the spirit, even one of the physical world.
In the end, Hardenberg read the first chapter of a novel he would never finish about the blue flower to Sophie. And, he called Sophie his Truth, his Spirit Guide, his Philosophy. Perhaps that was easier than the years of study and his inability to define what was elusive and inexplicable. Sophie was his tangible form for an ideal.
As for me, Penelope Fitzgerald’s launch as a writer at the age of 60 gives me hope. At 56 years old, I am heartened to learn that there may yet be words worth writing and productive years ahead.
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FOOTNOTES
*Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 1997). Originally published 1995 in Great Britain by Flamingo. The edition I quote above is the Harper Paperbacks, 2014.
*Laudanum is a tincture of opium, consisting of approximately 10% powdered opium dissolved in alcohol (ethanol)13. This reddish-brown, extremely bitter liquid contains several opium alkaloids, including morphine and codeine3. Historically, laudanum was widely used as a pain medication and cough suppressant, often referred to as a “cure-all” treatment during the Victorian era24. [Perplexity.AI]
*What is Laudanum? https://able2changerecovery.com/what-is-laudanum/
*On legal age of marriage in 18th century Saxony and 19th century United States. In 1794 during the Holy Roman Empire it was common to have betrothals, from the age of 7 years old, and marriage for girls at 12 and boys at 14. This was especially true of the nobility for alliances. A similar situation, inherited from England, existed in 1836, when Poe married Virginia at age 13, closer to 14 ,with her mother’s consent. Laws varied by state and in Maryland, marriage for girls was 12 and for boys was 14 with parental consent. Hardenberg’s betrothal was not actually made until Sophie was 14, but she died before they could be married. Both men were in their twenties. Hardenberg was 10 years older than Sophie and Poe was 14 years older than Virginia, who was his cousin. Marriage of first cousins was common during the times, widely accepted in Europe and in the States.
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