MANICHAEAN
04-25-2013, 11:30 PM
The German University.
A Short Story Assignment.
The town of Göttingen is celebrated for its sausages and its university, whilst its inhabitants are, for the purposes of classification generally divided into students, professors, philistines, and cattle. It contained at the time I was there, nine hundred and ninety-nine dwellings, divers churches, a lying-in hospital, an observatory, a prison for students, a library, and a "Ratskeller," where the beer was excellent. The town itself is beautiful, and pleases most when one's back is turned to it. Endoured with a gray, prim look, it is fully furnished with; dissertations, washerwomen, compendiums, roasted pigeons, and professors of the ordinary and extraordinary kind.
When I left it early that April morning, the learned, beyond doubt still lay in bed, dreaming as usual. On the road out of town I met the duly and comfortably appointed university beadles, whose duty it is to keep watch so that no students fight duels, and, above all, that no new ideas (such as are generally obliged to remain in quarantine for several decades) are smuggled in by speculative private lecturers. In such a university town there is an endless coming and going. Every three years beholds a new student-generation, forming an incessant human tide, where one semester-wave succeeds another, and only the old professors stand fast in the midst of this perpetual-motion flood, immovable as the pyramids of Egypt.
My horse appeared to be gifted with the character of extreme German deliberation, and as such, steady progress was made till I reached the Sun Inn at Brabach in time for lunch. It was there that I became engaged in conversation with a strange trio who evidently identifying me as of local origin and made enquiries of a respectable hotel in Gottingen. The man was relatively modest and undistinguished in both appearance and manner; whilst one of the ladies, evidently his wife, was an altogether extensively constructed dame, gifted with a rubicund square mile of countenance and dimples in her cheeks. A copious double chin appeared below, like an imperfect continuation of the face, while her high-piled bosom, which was defended by stiff points of lace and a many-cornered collar, as if by turrets and bastions, reminded one of a fortress. The other lady, her sister, seemed her extreme antitype. Her face was but a mouth between two ears; her breast was as inconsolably comfortless and dreary as the Lüneburger heath; while her absolutely dried-up figure reminded one of a charity table for poor theological students.
Both ladies asked me, in a breath, if respectable people lodged in the Hotel de Brübach that I had recommended. I assented to this question with a clear conscience, and as the charming trio drove away I waved my hand to them many times from the window. The landlord of The Sun laughed however, being probably aware that the Hotel de Brübach was well known for the wrong reasons and frequented by the students of Göttingen as an establishment of fallen angels.
A Short Story Assignment.
The town of Göttingen is celebrated for its sausages and its university, whilst its inhabitants are, for the purposes of classification generally divided into students, professors, philistines, and cattle. It contained at the time I was there, nine hundred and ninety-nine dwellings, divers churches, a lying-in hospital, an observatory, a prison for students, a library, and a "Ratskeller," where the beer was excellent. The town itself is beautiful, and pleases most when one's back is turned to it. Endoured with a gray, prim look, it is fully furnished with; dissertations, washerwomen, compendiums, roasted pigeons, and professors of the ordinary and extraordinary kind.
When I left it early that April morning, the learned, beyond doubt still lay in bed, dreaming as usual. On the road out of town I met the duly and comfortably appointed university beadles, whose duty it is to keep watch so that no students fight duels, and, above all, that no new ideas (such as are generally obliged to remain in quarantine for several decades) are smuggled in by speculative private lecturers. In such a university town there is an endless coming and going. Every three years beholds a new student-generation, forming an incessant human tide, where one semester-wave succeeds another, and only the old professors stand fast in the midst of this perpetual-motion flood, immovable as the pyramids of Egypt.
My horse appeared to be gifted with the character of extreme German deliberation, and as such, steady progress was made till I reached the Sun Inn at Brabach in time for lunch. It was there that I became engaged in conversation with a strange trio who evidently identifying me as of local origin and made enquiries of a respectable hotel in Gottingen. The man was relatively modest and undistinguished in both appearance and manner; whilst one of the ladies, evidently his wife, was an altogether extensively constructed dame, gifted with a rubicund square mile of countenance and dimples in her cheeks. A copious double chin appeared below, like an imperfect continuation of the face, while her high-piled bosom, which was defended by stiff points of lace and a many-cornered collar, as if by turrets and bastions, reminded one of a fortress. The other lady, her sister, seemed her extreme antitype. Her face was but a mouth between two ears; her breast was as inconsolably comfortless and dreary as the Lüneburger heath; while her absolutely dried-up figure reminded one of a charity table for poor theological students.
Both ladies asked me, in a breath, if respectable people lodged in the Hotel de Brübach that I had recommended. I assented to this question with a clear conscience, and as the charming trio drove away I waved my hand to them many times from the window. The landlord of The Sun laughed however, being probably aware that the Hotel de Brübach was well known for the wrong reasons and frequented by the students of Göttingen as an establishment of fallen angels.