The Gallery of Good Spirits

Albert von Schirnding's "Gallery of Good Spirits" is the sum of life-long reading. It is hard to imagine life without Sappho, for example, who asks Aphrodite to stand by her in the struggle for a girl’s affection; or Hamlet, who gave the fourteen-year-old the feeling of being a Robinson nobody knows about - somewhere between the shores of being and non-being. We also meet Novalis, whose existence was permeated with the power of love in every fibre; and Schopenhauer, who teaches his readers that truth can coincide with the bad and the ugly instead of the good and the beautiful, and whose philosophy nevertheless provides comfort. Albert von Schirnding tempts us to rediscover his darlings from the spiritual kingdom and to adopt some of them as our good spirits.