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Near the outset of Büchner’s “Lenz,” the protagonist seeks to impress himself into the earth, “[E]r dehnte sich aus und lag über der Erde, er wühlte sich in das All hinein, es war eine Lust, die ihm wehe tat.” This course will examine the desire to merge with the surface of the earth and to become a planetary body, at once utterly material and utterly ethereal. The earth’s crust will emerge as the interface between cosmic forces and human existence, the atmosphere and the pedosphere. We will consider how history, biography, and geological time intersect in dirt, or what William Bryant Logan has recently called the “ecstatic skin of the earth,” in texts by Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Novalis, Nietzsche, Büchner, Walser, Rilke, Kafka, and Sebald.