The World as Likeness
Goethe writes at the end of Faust II: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis”1 – all that is transient is only a likeness. Our bodies age, friendships shift, cities are rebuilt. People I thought would be constants turned out to be chapters. What I have loved has rarely lasted in the form I first met it. Yet Goethe does not say: “So it was all pointless.” He says: it is a likeness – something real, but also a hint of more. I find that strangely consoling.
The key word is Gleichnis. In everyday German it can mean parable, image, comparison. For Goethe it is deeper: a way the world speaks. A Gleichnis is something completely itself, like a leaf stuck to my shoe after rain or a tired face on the metro; at the same time Gleichnis points beyond itself. It is not an illusion. It is more like a doorway. When I actually look at one thing with some patience, with all its detail and limits, I sometimes sense how it leans toward other things: how this one gesture, this one sunset, this one failure, belongs to a larger pattern I am only slowly learning to read.
Goethe believed we do not understand the world only by measuring it, but also by sensing patterns of likeness. Because things change, it becomes easier to notice what keeps returning. A friendship that fades, for instance, reveals how constant the need for recognition and companionship actually is. A building that is suddenly demolished irritates more than expected, and in that irritation, it becomes clear that that place had become 'home.' The passing of the form throws the underlying meaning into sharper outline.
To live with Goethe’s line is, for me, to treat my own days as a series of Gleichnisse.2 A success is not just success; it is a likeness of how I relate to achievement, how quickly I hitch my worth to outcomes. A heartbreak is not just an end; it is a likeness of how far I am willing to risk myself in love, and where my limits still are. None of these moments are final. They are scenes, not verdicts. If all that is transient is only a likeness, then every day is a small, passing image in which something more enduring is trying to be seen.
Footnotes
1 Gleichnis: A German word that can mean parable, allegory, or symbolic image. In Goethe’s usage it suggests that concrete, everyday things can function as meaningful “likenesses” of something deeper or more universal.
2 Gleichnisse: Plural of Gleichnis. Here it refers to many different moments or situations in a life, each of which can be read as a small parable or symbolic scene.