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Written on the Scroll: Diderot, Goethe and Blixen

On 3 April 1780, Goethe read the whole of Diderot's Jacques Ie fataliste in a single six-hour sitting. The feat is recorded in his diary for that day, and also in a letter to Johann Heinrich Merck; both accounts use the image of an enormous meal consumed as if it were a single glass of water and with 'unbeschreiblicher Wollust' .1 The gastronomic metaphor communicates the sheer exhilaration of encountering Diderot's brilliantly playful work for the first time and nicely echoes its Rabelaisian character. The function of the image is however not exclusively rhetorical. Here is the whole passage as it appears in the letter: