Word: weltschmertz
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...Garfinkel feels a little jaded, but he talks about his Weltschmertz with a smile. "Nothing will ever surprise me now. Nothing could after this," he says. "I feel like I've seen every type of person you could possibly find, and half of the people here would be considered abnormal anywhere else. Here no one is abnormal. You really get a different view on things...
...even the most outrageous of Belgrader's devices, with a pouting, resonant voice that undoubtedly reminded more than one member of the audience of Tony Randall. Bored, not spiteful, puzzled rather than offended by the folly around him, he delivers the set-piece "seven ages of man" speech with weltschmertz instead of venom...
Nonetheless, the simple genius of Brel's music carries the show. With deftness and economy this balladeer of the down-and-out mixed the tender and the funereal into a weltschmertz as heady as any German musician has ever brewed. These are songs that use familiar sounds--the sagging languor of a torch-song, the steady intensity of an army march--to put the listener off-guard and then knock him flat with cynical or black-humorous lyrics. "Marathon" goes on a careless, accelerating dance through the 20th century, nostalgically stopping at favorite decades, until the abrupt, eschatological ending puts...
...occasional sadistic delight. One of the functionaries is Plantagenet himself, who has programmed (in his own image) a self-operating machine which is called fate and which actually runs the earth. The "tertiary spiritual leader" nominally responsible for the earth, the official locally designated "God," appears here as Nathan Weltschmertz, an amiable, blundering fellow whose ambition to realize a personal utopia the machine continually frustrates...
...frustrated, Weltschmertz becomes "sick"; he assists two lost souls to break through the barrier of earth into the void. The souls, Hector and Gnatalia (in a vague way Adam and Eve figures), pollute the atmosphere of the void; so much so that Rex Regis, a vice-President, must call upon Plantagenet to psychoanalyze Nathan, and persuade Him that He can in fact control His planet in His own way. And that the Doctor does, with what an earlier school of reviewing would call many riotous consequences...
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