“Wandering Bell”

Before posting the call on this blog for literature about inanimate suffering, I did the usual Googling around for inanimate literature options to try to help my colleague.

The weirdest one I came across was a work by Goethe I didn’t know, called “Wandering Bell.” A boy doesn’t go to church, so the church bell comes down to persecute him in the fields. It’s a pretty disturbing image. And worse yet, it was even set to music by Schumann.