Acid Reflux, Goethe and Life’s Labyrinth

“Des lebens labyrinthisch irren lauf” “Life’s labyrinthine chaos course” (my translation) is from Goethe’s, Faust, Prologue in the Theater. This is my favorite line in all the literature I’ve read. This line made me fall in love with Goethe. He got it right, if he was describing my life, anyway. 🙂

I was reading about acid reflux yesterday (yeah) and some doctor wrote, “Though they don’t have any serious side-effects and are not, generally, dangerous, anti-acids don’t cure anything and that’s a problem.”

I thought, “How is that a problem if I feel better?” Then I saw how life is a lot like acid-reflux… There’s no cure, but we can feel better. Life-choices are confusing and too many of them are truly serious and irrevocable. We’re only at any given place in life one time. Life only goes in one direction and we reach the Minotaur whether we have Ariadne’s thread or not. Stuff happens all around us — sometimes catastrophic, terrifying stuff. We have a lot of anti-acids, too, sayings and affirmations that are meant to help us through the darker parts of the labyrinth.

Some are even quoted from Goethe, “Nothing matters more than this day.” Well, that might actually be true, OK this one, “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it,” and this one, Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen” they are anti-acids. It’s good to believe in yourself because it makes life better than doubting yourself. It’s good to dream, too, because then we are momentarily lifted from whatever daily horror we might be in. But the truth is we cannot “make anything happen” even though the idea that we can does make us feel better. I think it’s good to “feel better” even if the doctor quoted above doesn’t think feeling better is enough. Since there is no cure either for life or acid reflux, feeling better is the best we have, all we have.

But in this often quoted Goethe phrase, there IS a cure.

“Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

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The photo above is the Giardino Giusti in Verona which both Goethe and I visited on separate occasions (ha ha). It has a small labyrinth and many other amazing features of a classical Renaissance garden. Goethe loved it, and cut some bows from the cypress trees to take back to where he was living. The trees represented funerals to the people of the city and he was surprised to be greeted by expressions of condolence.

Here’s another Goetheian post on the question of the labyrinth. 

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/maze/