I had a chance to get a lot of reading done at work today, so I'm over two-thirds of the way through Faust. I can't tell if the story is getting easier to understand or if I'm just getting better at reading it, but it seems like I'm getting more of the story now than I once was. One of my clients at work (I'm a caregiver for elderly people) is very well-read and of German ancestry, so I mentioned to him today that I was reading Faust and he said, "Wow, I read that. It's kind of hard to understand, though, isn't it?" so I felt a little better about my lack of comprehension!
I have two quotes for you today. The first one is by Mephistopheles, in which he is upset about something and he says,
"Oh, to the devil I'd give myself instanter, if I were not already he!"
In the second, Mephistopheles says,
"Such love-sick fools will puff away sun, moon and stars and all in the azure,
To please a maiden's whimsies, any day."
The vocabulary word of the day is "ennui" which means "a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement" (definition from The New Oxford American Dictionary).
Before I go, I had to tell you about a great bargain I got on books yesterday. I work at a retirement home, and they had a book sale, so of course I couldn't resist going to check it out. I ended up spending only six dollars and I got an anthology of humor pieces from The New Yorker, a copy of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (which is on the list!) and a copy of The Scarlet Letter with a copyright date of 1919! All in all, a pretty successful book-shopping trip, I think!
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