Word: weltschmerz
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...paint that fence and why you thought your boredom was more profound than that of an eight-year-old who got tired of the same old toys (you never said it was, but you were close enough to eight to remember vaguely that eight-year-old Weltschmerz was a lot profounder than the man talking...
...paint that fence and why you thought your boredom was more profound than that of an eight-year-old who got tired of the same old toys (you never said it was, but you were close enough to eight to remember vaguely that eight-year-old Weltschmerz was a lot profounder than the man talking...
...Germans may have the word for it: Weltschmerz. But French writers have a long tradition in it too-a literary bleating of the young in which the gyrations of the ephemeral self and the monumental turnings of the solar system get dizzily confused. J.M.G. Le Clézio is a handsome lad of 29 with sporting initials and a static style who has in recent years been a flashily successful practitioner of that mournful art. His first book, The Interrogation, a kind of Krapp's First Tape, won France's third most prestigious literary award, the Prix Renaudot...
...flourished-where a stronger talent in a weaker man might never have come to fruition. In the long run, isolation proved a blessing. For Cary had to sweat over his craft far from the corrupting literary ambience that often sustains but modishly distorts young talent. London was full of Weltschmerz and fashionable reliance on canned Freud and Frazer. Cary was unaffected. Literary myth seekers and archetype spotters will look in vain through Cary's fiction. "My novels point out that the world consists entirely of exceptions," he wrote. Persistently, he saw the world as a struggle between creative...
...case, starting as a happily married, witty college professor, Tattersall explores the U.S. penchant for nerve-racking upward mobility by trying it in reverse. In an excess of whim and Weltschmerz, he runs through a job in advertising ("I stink, therefore I am"), a stint as a successful TV singer, and on down through door-to-door salesman, street peddler, gardener, handyman and tramp. He winds up living in a run-down tenement, selling canned "fresh air" door to door to help take care of a mumbling mongoloid boy and a drunken mongrel basset hound. One night he gets...