Faultless soul disease

Lecture notes on Goethe’s Erl-King

Some people claim that romanticism is a soul illness, and whoever gets it would not last long. I think it’s not exactly true, I bear opinion that we come to this world already contaminated. We just don’t realise it unless we get to read Goethe.

The Erlking has irresistible magnetism within, something from an auld folk tale, or grandma’s stories, when she was humming beside our bed during a dark rainy night keeping away all the creatures lurking in the shadows — unknown, invisible and unobvious.

Often we do not realize it, but romanticism is everything but boring kind of literature everyone had long forgotten and only the grey bearded old men with a pipe at the universities chatter about. Tales like Erlking have accompanied us since childhood in various forms, we grew up on romantic foundations unknowingly.

Father galloping overnight with his son terrified of whispering apparitions, father not knowing of his son’s fears, a blind old man and all-seeing boy, isn’t this a perfect allegory of family bonds? Finally, the Erlking is about ourselves, about journey through darkness into a light that cannot be seen but it is out there, somewhere behind the dark veil of dense forest.

Woods, nature, horse, galloping emotions, all this adds up to a hereditary disease that we’re passing unconsciously through generations.