mir-nicht: “Exhausted, morose, [Hegel] sat there as if collapsed into himself, his head bent d

mir-nicht: “Exhausted, morose, [Hegel] sat there as if collapsed into himself, his head bent down, and while speaking kept turning pages and searching in his long folio notebooks, forward and backward, high and low. His constant clearing of his throat and coughing interrupted any flow of speech. Every sentence stood alone and come out with effort, cut in peaces and jumbled. Every word, every syllable detached itself only reluctantly to receive a strangely thorough emphasis from the metallic-empty voice with its broad Swabian dialect, as if each were the most important. … Eloquence that flows along smoothly presupposes that the speaker is finished with the subject inside and out and has it by heart, and formal skill has the ability to glide on garrulously and most graciously in what is half-baked and superficial. This man, however, had to raise up the most powerful thoughts from the deepest ground of things, and if they were to have a living effect then, although they had been pondered and worked over years before and ever again, they had to regenerate themselves in him in an ever living present.”— H. G. Hotho, describing Hegel’s lectures as a Dozent in Berlin (quoted in Adorno’s Drei Studien zu Hegel). -- source link

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