ANTAKALIPA

The Sorrows of Young Werther: Love, Impracticality, and the Romance That Could Never Survive From the moment Werther begins to write, his fate is already sealed. Not because Charlotte belongs to another man, nor because society is cruel, but because Werther mistakes intensity for truth and feeling for destiny. The Sorrows of Young Werther presents itself as a love story, but it is, more precisely, a story about what happens when love is entrusted to someone who cannot live in the world as it is. Goethe wants us to feel with Werther. He succeeds brilliantly. But whether Werther deserves our full sympathy is another matter entirely. A Heart Too Open for Its Own Good Werther arrives in Wahlheim emotionally unguarded. He does not observe life; he absorbs it whole. Early diary entries pulse with delight: “I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents.” This line is charming — and already alarming. Werther ...

Romanticism  Don’t be a romantic is what I gathered from Johann Wolfgang von Goete’s book “The sorrows of Young Werther”. The book tells the story of a passionate doomed love affair between a young poet called Werther and a beautiful clever young woman named Charlotte. Unfortunately for Werther, Charlotte is married, so the love affair is impossible from the very start but that doesn’t stop Werther, a dreamy and practical young man who loves the arts above all else. Werther is under pressure to have a sensible career and join the bourgeois life but he can only think about one thing: the impulses of his heart. Eventually young Werther can’t take it anymore and kills himself, but rather than condemn him as a lunatic and a hothead, Goete one of the founding fathers of romanticism directs all our sympathies towards Werther. We are supposed to be on his side admiring his passionate and entirely impractical attitude to love. I think that love is a biochemical that the conscio...