An iconic sexual encounter rain scene, from the 2010 film Young Goethe in Love, of Goethe’s passionate affair with Charlotte Buff—which was quickly extinguished owing to her family’s financial situation—and his other various intellectual and poetry “passions”, in the 1771, when Goethe was age 22, the year he became a lawyer, which may well capture one aspect Goethe's famous retrospect 1830 comment: “I lived every word of my Elective Affinities.” [7] |
“Crebillon … treats the passions like playing cards, that one can shuffle, play, reshuffle, and play again, without their changing at all. There is no trace of the delicate, chemical affinity, through which they attract and repel each other, reunite, neutralize [each other], separate again and recover.”
“Never treat the passions like playing cards.”
“In 1809, Goethe printed the most exceptionable of his novels, the Wahlverwandschaften (“Elective Affinities”), in which the charms and graces of this style are employed in the description of the impulses which spring from the collision of passion and duty in the relations of marriage. By the title of the book, and in the whole spirit of it, he would represent that sexual affinities follow the same inevitable law as chemical affinities, and that humanity struggles impotently against the dictates of nature. Like all his productions, this was suggested by circumstances in his own experience. The work shocked the moral world, in spite of the beauty with which it was written, and to this day tasks the ingenuity of those of his admirers who seek to defend it from attack.”
“The passions are defects or excellencies only in excess.”
“Our passions are true phoenixes: as the old burn out, the new straight rise up out of the ashes.”
“Violent passions are incurable diseases; the means which will cure them are what first make them thoroughly dangerous.”
“Passion is both raised and softened by confession. In nothing, perhaps, were the middle way more desirable than in knowing what to say and what not to say to those we love.”
Equations of Elective AffinitiesHelmholtz (1882) Nernst
(1906)Lewis
(1923)De Donder
(1936)Perrot
(1998)
“First we separate the study of ophelimity (economic satisfaction) from the diverse forms of utility, then we direct our attention to man himself; stripping him of a large number of his attributes, leaving out the passions, good or bad, reducing him to a kind of molecule that only acts in response to the forces of ophelimity.”
“A classification based on their relative electricity or relative energy or enthusiasm would not of itself help us much, for misapplied energy and wasteful application of human forces are common. The classification of entropy, referring to temperature changes which can be likened to coolness, passion, explosiveness and frigidity, are all interesting but of themselves prove little.”
“In human intimate terms, enthalpy correlates to the heat of passion within human relationships.”
“How few men reflect, and even among those who pay attention to themselves, scarcely any have found the thread for the labyrinth of our passions.”— Bernard Mandeville (c.1714) [9]
“The only unions which are legitimate are those ruled by a genuine passion.”— Stendhal (1822), On Love