A man of girth

摘要

Goethe's life is massively well documented. All good libraries will have the eight volumes (about 6,000 pages) of a thing called "Goethes Leben von Tag zu Tag" in which you can look up what he was doing most days of his 82 years. Goethe himself wrote a great deal of autobiography, notably "Dich-tung und Wahrheit", but much else besides. Indeed, in 1797, aged 47, he seems to have determined to be-come not just his own but also, as Nicholas Boyle suggests, his only biographer; he began documenting his daily employment—his reading, writing, his studies etc—in a form presentable to posterity.