Goethe and reification

When Faust bargains with the devil for his soul he closes the deal with the words:

Werde ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn.

A translation of the meaning of these lines would go something like:
If I say to any given moment:
linger on, you are so beautiful!
Then you may put me in chains,
then I will gladly go to ruin.

The infernal character of these lines does not originate merely from the fact that the devil himself is the addressee, but that they are symptomatic of reification. "Happiness" Adorno teaches us "is like truth, you do not posses it, you are engulfed in it." That is why "no happy person can ever know he is happy. /.../ The only relationship that consciousness can have to happiness is gratitute." What Goethe expresses in these lines is a reified awareness of happiness, a need to objectify and manipulate time itself, when hapiness can exist only by being fleeting and fragile, despite the efforts of propaganda agents of the culture industry, psychoanalysts and advertisers. The dictate: "be happy!" does not need to be juxtaposed to the empirical reality of the adressee to be revealed as cynical, it is a lie in itself.