I did read Büchner's Lenz today, as planned, along with Celan's Meridian. And I prepared to read Büchner by reading the original Lenz himself: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. I read his story Zerbin.

I'm too tired to think through any deeper comments than the observation that it is fascinating to read three short, intense texts in quick succession from three different centuries. Zerbin is a very eighteenth-century story, and Lenz feels very nineteenth-century (along with its "anticipatory" quality, pointing toward 20th-century developments, it is nevertheless a 19th-century text), while Celan's Meridian speech could hardly have been written before the 20th (before Modernism, to put a period term on it). A fascinating set of texts, on which I will try to comment more in the course of the week.