"Loving who sustains us, floating in eternal bliss--my friend, when everything growns dim then before my eyes, and sky and earth rest in my soul like the image of a beloved being--I am often overcome by longing and by the thought: could you only breathe upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, so that it might become the mirror of your soul as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God! --My friend--but it is more than I can bear; I succumb to the power and the glory of these visions."(9 Goethe)
This feels totally modern. If modern is that which is not "old" or "futuristic," what could possibly be more modern than a story that appeals only to the present? Seaped in passion, emotion, and authenticity, Werther's letters (although dated) throw away all time, as he drags you into his presence. Just as Lotte is able to entrance him with her "melody" ("Not one word about the magic power of music in antiquity seems to me improbably when I am under the spell of her simple melody" (47).), Goethe entranced me with his genuine love for Lotte. His experience became mine, his pain, his love, his frustration and his joy, and like Werther, "The author whom I like most of all is the one who takes me into my own world, where everything happens as it does around me, and whose story, nevertheless, becomes to me as interesting and as touching as my life at home, which is certainly not a paradise but is, on the whole, a source of inexpressible happiness to me" (25).
Written more than two decades before my life time, the story has not aged one bit, as it resonates so clearly and so perfectly, as it is not a story about a man hopelessly in love with a woman, but a truly romantic work of love. In life, we often strive to find understanding or impose meaning on a world made absurd by inevitable death (doom?) with a higher power (i.e. God) or a system of measuring its distance (time). Yet, when asked to explain these pillars of certainty/understanding, one finds that both are unidentifiable. Time may lead one to believe that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west "every day,"
but what is every day? Today is not yesterday, yesterday not today, nor tomorrow, nor three days from now. These systems of order only act to create a false sense of comfort. "There is a certain monotony about mankind. Most people toil during the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the slender span of free time that remains worries them so much that they try by every means to get rid of it. O Destiny of Man!" (9), proclaims Werther, echoing this futility. "...does it make any real difference whether I count peas or lentils? As everything in the world amounts after all to nothing to speak of, a person who drudges for the sake of others, for money or honors or what not, without following his own ambition, his own need, is always a fool" (49), he continues. While justice, order and stability may be provided by these constructs, true freedom and understanding can only result from that which can be known: the present. By turning inwards to what he knows, Werther, although seemingly tormented by an impossible love, was embrassing the absurdity in life, and forming a compainionship with what is, rather than building expectations and hopes upon what may be or what could be. And with this he finds that, "however confined he may be, he still holds forever in his heart that sweet feeling of freedom, and knows he can leave his prison whenever he likes" (13). And he does, as he takes ultimate control over his life by ending it with his own hands.
Werther begins this epistololary by writing, "I am so happy, dear friend, so completely sunk in the sensation of sheer being that my art suffers. I could not draw anything just now, not a line, and yet I have never been a greater painter than at the present moment" (5). Art is not a dead object, it is alive. It is an experience, not an tangiable aesthetic. And in the presence, the moments of "sheer being," he is able to unknow "art" as it was, should be or could be, and paint what is. This carries over into his life, it is not anything that can be understood or measured, it simply is. The world is forever changing, "alive," if you will, and knowable. Werther tried not to tame the absurdity that abounds, but rather find the rhythm, the flow, and form a compainionship between the world and the mind that was totally organic, bonding the world and the mind. Fore, "what would the world mean to our hearts with out love" (47)! And what can we know in the world that is not our hearts? And because of that it was, is and will forever be "modern."
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