In addition, a gentle young man was made happy discovering other classics, and how cheap they were, and walked away, for example, with The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
I am now a bit worried about the gentle young man, as I have reminded myself of the plot of Young Werther via Wikipedia. Aauughh, suicidal romantic youth.
It is an epistolary and autobiographical novel, although Goethe himself survived. The book made him very famous, everybody loved and read it, the author later distanced himself from it, and that'll teach you to write about unrequited love and to write to your beloved and ask for pistols. That is, don't!
Oh, gentle young man, maybe have the satirical Joys of Young Werther, by Friedrich Nicolai, on hand as an antidote.
Or Emma, by Jane Austen, about a sort of clueless matchmaker. (Hence, Clueless, the film with Alicia Silverstone.) And possibly an inspiration for The Matchmaker, by Thornton Wilder, revised from his own earlier version, The Merchant of Yonkers, with The Matchmaker then leading to Hello, Dolly, which I watched half of last night before falling asleep.
Then I woke up and attempted a little crazy middle-aged matchmaking in the fantasyland of my own clueless head. And by email. Please, please forgive me. If you do, I promise not to turn my life into an epistolary musical.
Ah, I see that I can't punctuate Hello, Dolly! in the list of labels for this post, as ! is a total no-no and , splits up the words.
ReplyDeleteGoethe like Byron is still among the greats today ! Works like Werther represent good old romantic 18th century Germany before the modern cultural struggles and ideologies.
ReplyDelete"...then I feel the presence
of the Almighty, who formed us in his own image, and the breath of
that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around
us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the form of a beloved mistress..."