Devil with a blue dress on

 Devil with a blue dress on 

This (below) was in my Twitter feed this morning – or something like it was.

"Pick that up!"

     It sent me to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, looking for that scene, set in Italy somewhere. Leverkühn, the composer, is recording his meeting with the devil, whose reality he is inclined to – or he wishes – to doubt. So, they have been arguing. One of Leverkuhn’s arguments against His - the Devil’s; the third-person pronouns are always capitalized – against His reality is that He (the devil) tells him (Leverkühn) nothing about himself that he does not already know. Is it conversation? The composer could just as well be talking to himself, hallucinating because he has been ill. The devil counters that he hasn’t been that ill; besides, why wouldn't He know all that Leverkühn knows?

     Another argument occurs to the composer. Earlier the Devil has responded to his question, “What should I call you?” “Anything you like except Dicis-et-non-facis,” that is, You-say-but-you-do-not-do. So now Leverkühn addresses Him as Dicis-et-non-es, You-say-but-you-are-not, because the Devil would not be there, in Italy; that’s not where he would have “searched [Leverkühn] out . . . in alien Italy of all places,” where Leverkühn challenges, “you are quite out of your realm and enjoy not the least popularity?” It would be absurd for the devil to come to him there. He might well have come to him in Kaisersachern, where Leverkühn grew up, or in Wittenberg, or on the Wartburg. “But surely not here, under a heathen Catholic sky!”

     But it’s not a matter of religion, the Devil replies; though perhaps He is more Protestant than Roman Catholic. It is certainly not a matter of place, at least geographically! If Leverkühn is free to roam, why not He? Didn’t they grow up together, neither in sunny Italy – both where the winters were dark and cold and the people huddled indoors and inside themselves? “Where I am,” He concludes, “there is Kaisersachern.”  
     So He says to all of us born north of the 36th parallel. Where you are, born in Dover, NJ. There I was; here I am.

10.07.16