Goethe, Hafiz and the Dangerous Love

Hi Ghazal,

In case you are in the mood for some time out today, send a message. I would be happy to accompany you to go to town or to the lake or whereever you want.
Otherwise, I will spend the day in the lab.

Take Care, my dear,

Michael
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Hi Michael,

yesterday i went to the centrum to look around a bit and then i was home and looked up some genes and saw the movie “a space odysseys”. it was good. but i didnt like the ending. didnt understand.

today i was invited to omid to eat something and to watch the football.

i liked the story about the cat and the dog. good that they became friends at last.

ooh, you found a persian place. i think i saw it before in march, i missed it then as well. and also this time. yes maybe they will have something in august. thank you for finding the website.

have a good day

/ghazal
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Ghazal, my dear,

When I came to the institute today the first thing I recognized was your bike. You see I”m really crazy, the first thing I though was that you might have also come to the lab on Sunday. It would be a terrific thing, hoewever, if somebody as magnificent and young and charming as you would spend such a nice day here.

Later on I red your e-mail and I was absolut happy to hear that you had a nice program over the weekend. I can imagine how much you enjoyed to talk with Omid nand his family in your mothers tongue. I really would like to watch a vidoe-record of this evening (of course with english or german sub-titles), and I can imagine that it would remind me of some scenes from the movie “woman without man” (where the educated people meet and discuss about the meaning of life).

Ghazal, do you remember the picture on the exhibition we have been together, the one with the wooden floor and the two big sculptures in the corner. I told you it shows the house-museum of the biggest german poet/writer J.W.von Goethe. I completely forgot one aspect of Goethe: He was very much fascinated by the oriental poetry. I”m 100% sure one of his most personal collections of poems, called the “West-Eastern Divan”, must have been translated into persian. Goethe absolutely adored the persian poet Hafiz. And the museum in Weimar (the one shown on the picture at the exhibition) was visited in the year 2000 by the late iranian president Khatami. But be careful, the report is published by a fundamentalist-marxist news-paper, which is a bit extreme in its opinion. However, everything they write about Goethe and his universalism and openess to oriental culture is o.k.

Another link for you, my dear, just to prove that not everything I tell you is phantasy, is this paper by Dutton and Aron about the psychological experiment on the dangerous bridge. You remember I told you about it when we crossed the “highway” with the dangerous traffic last week. The paper is so nicely and clearly written, I cannot imagine the two authors ever considered that two people crossing a dangerous street in Munich on a sunny Thursday in 2010 would consider their scientific conclusion relevant for their own situation.

I have to apologize ones again for this long and mind-blasting e-mail.

I wish you a relaxing evening and night.

Michael