Fragments of Lichtenberg

In just over half a century, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) had the time to be all of the following: a hunchback; a mathematician; a physics professor; a connoisseur of hare pate; a hermit; an electrical theorist; a skirtchaser; a friend of King George III of England; an asthmatic; a defender of reason; a hypochondriac; a dying man; and the author of 8,000 fragments written with ink and goose quills. Traditionally those fragments have been considered no more than aphorisms, to be sipped like fine schnapps, but certain scholars claim, however, that his famous "Wastebooks" are really the scattered pieces of a Great Novel, and that this might yet be reconstructed, with the help of scissors, glue, and paper, and by using what is left of out imaginations. The present volume retracts, among other things, the work undertaken for more than a century by valiant Lichtenbergians.