Word: wertherism
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GLYNDEBOURNE FESTIVAL (through Aug. 3) presents four operas amid the ambiance of a lush, 125-acre Sussex estate. Mozart's Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni alternate with Massenet's Werther and Debussy's Pelléas et Melisande...
...Leaps of Love. This novel is scarcely more than a rewrite of Goethe's romantic masterpiece, The Sorrows of Young Werther. It is one of the simplest love stories in the world, but Berto's sense of irony transforms it. He unerringly follows the foolish impulse to the ridiculous act, the self-deception to the empty boast, the self-doubt to the confident lie-all the leaps that young love tries and fails to make...
Psychedelic Flip-Out. The ultimate weapon of the alienated young remains the same as that employed by Goethe's Werther: oblivion, either physical (through suicide) or psychological (through drugs). Usually it is the latter, though suicide rates are rising through much of the world in the 18-to-25 age group. In Iran, for example, fully 95% of the suicides are in the Now Generation; in the U.S. nearly one in ten. More often, the flip-out is psychedelic. Acid-heads and pot smokers feel that they can ease the weight of the Sisyphean stone by drug...
...drugs, last month). Studies of identical twins indicate that there is no genetic factor, but suicide does run in some families-perhaps because of the suggestibility that occasionally produces epidemics of suicide, such as that in 18th century Germany in imitation of Goethe's sick but romantic hero, Werther. Marilyn Monroe felt that she had good cause to hate the world, and may well have unconsciously fantasied many suicides do-that in killing herself she was destroying it, as in A. E. Housman's poem...
...Eliot) have cast him in, but in the safe and comfortable role of a backwoods Penrod or Andy Hardy-the eternally lovable bad boy. Until very recently, the sheltered and privileged American young gladly went along with that role. Their hell-raising was equally far removed from Werther's despair and the political barricades. The U.S. was thus enabled to go on worshiping youth without really facing the traits of youth that all other civilizations have accepted as inevitable-rebelliousness, moodiness, shifting passions for shifting causes. Americans want to deny the basic conflict, not to say war, between youth...