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The Novices of Sais

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The Novices of Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen are two works by Novalis that are very important to me.

I was aware of *The Novices of Sais* long before it was published in translation by archipelago. I vainly searched for out of print translations. I e-mailed someone at Dedalus, asking them to publish a translation. (Dedalus does much important German lit.) So, as I've liked to claim about other German works that appear in print now in the U.S., I feel I conjured this translation.

The work is poetic. It goes into the difficult, antithetical aspect of human reason, and how to deal with that problem. Both naturalism and antinaturalism are embraced.

There is a passage that could very well have inspired Wagner's notion of gesamptkunstwerke. "...he heard, saw, touched and thought at once."

He is fleshing out Goethe's naturalism. As God mellows with time (and disappears); nature mellows--

"...then the sun will lay down her harsh scepter."

Caves are important in *The Novices*, as they are in *Heinrich von Ofterdingen*. They are tranformation places; alchemical transformations take place there. (In Hermann Broch's *The Spell*--the mine) Metals were thought to grow underground through "telluric forces". (Alchemy is about human transformation.)

Novalis' mention of the "world soul" reminds us of Fechner, who may have been influenced by Novalis as he developed a conception of the earth that is along the lines of what we now call "gaia".

The last admonition is great advice for anyone, especially artists:

"...he who feels an inner calling to impart the understanding of nature to other men, to develop and cultivate this gift in men, must first give careful regard to the natural causes of this development and endeavor to learn the elements of this art from nature. Having thus gained an insight he will devise a system based on experiment, analysis and comparison, whereby these means may be applied by any individual; this system will become like second nature to him and then he will embark with enthusiasm upon his rewarding task."

While we Americans usually are quite satisfied with the first raw improvisations that we spew forth.

Beautiful little book. Written by Novalis, one of the overlooked literary geniuses of all time, this book is one of his major works. His writings were few and fragmentary due to an early death at age 29. What he did write is profound. The drawings by Paul Klee are interesting but no match for the beauty and depth of Novalis' mind.

This deeply cryptic and beautiful little text is perhaps Novalis' most beautiful and complex work. The Novices of Sais unfolds as a hermetic prose poem in which the various approaches to the study and contemplation of nature are discussed and compared. Novalis sees the poetic as the unifying method-as well as that which is nearest to the inner truth of nature. This brief and beautiful text continues to haunt and inspire its readers, its place has been secured in the tradition. Paul Klee's illustrations are characteristically poignant and simple at once.