Wendell on Faust

From Wendell's, The Necessity of Agriculture

In Goethe’s Faust, the devil Mephistopheles is fulfilling some of the learned doctor’s wishes by means of witchcraft, which the doctor is finding unpleasant. The witches cook up a brew that promises to make him young, but Faust is nauseated by it. He asks (this is Randall Jarrell’s translation):

Has neither Nature nor some noble mind

Discovered some remedy, some balsam?

Mephistopheles, who is a truth-telling devil, replies:

There is a natural way to make you young. . . .

Go out in a field

And start right in to work: dig, hoe,

Keep your thoughts and yourself in that field,

Eat the food you raise . . .

Be willing to manure the field you harvest.

And that’s the best way—take it from me!—

To go on being young at eighty.

Faust, a true intellectual, unsurprisingly objects:

Oh, but to live spade in hand—

I’m not used to it, I couldn’t stand it.

So narrow a life would not suit me.

And Mephistopheles replies:

Well then, we still must have the witch.

Lately I’ve been returning to that passage again and again, and every time I read it I laugh. I laugh because it is a piece of superb wit, and because it is true. Faust’s idea that farm life is necessarily “narrow” remains perfectly up to date. And it is still true that to escape that alleged narrowness requires the agency of a supernatural or extrahuman power—though now, for Goethe’s witchcraft, we would properly substitute industrial agriculture.

(By the way does anyone really know how to pronounce Goethe's name without swallowing their tongue or is that just me?)