Weltschmerz

 In prepping for class--reading and taking notes on a friend's essay I've assigned--I ran into a fun word: Weltschmerz. From the German words for world and pain, the term means (in the quick-searched dictionary.com's phrase) "sorrow that one feels and accepts as one's necessary portion in life; sentimental pessimism."

I had vaguely associated the term with German Romanticism (Sorrows of Young Werther sort of stuff). Wikipedia specifies that it's from Jean Paul (a German Romantic), who in turn takes it from a work by the Brothers Grimm (!) to describe "tiefe Traurigkeit über die Unzulänglichkeit der Welt" ("deep sadness about the inadequacy of the world").

How to say: I love this word. "World-weariness"--a resignation that the world is not and will never be "good." 

I'm struck, on the one hand, at how well it captures the worldview of my spirit animal: Eeyore. (My sister insists that my spirit animal is the octopus, which I love! But so often my spirit seems shaped like a depressed stuffed donkey.)

 

 

Weirdly, the idea also seems to resonate with (my inadequate understanding of) certain Buddhist precepts. Life is suffering. Suffering comes from desire/attachment. Letting of of that attachment is a way through. 

Weltschmerz, though, doesn't let go of attachment. It steeps simply misses it, saturating in suffering for what cannot be. It's melancholy without the process of mourning. 

And as such, it becomes--like Eeyore--slightly pitiable and silly. "Sentimental pessimism" is such a cool phrase. (Good job, dictionary-dot-com!) It takes something that could be profound and deep--there are modes of deep pessimism, I think--and empties it of profundity, making it a pose or an attitude. The stereotype of goth teens (or, later, emo teens) likewise seems a species of "sentimental pessimism." Of course, teens of every generation often do suffer from serious depression, so the stereotype itself lacks some generosity and understanding.

BUT--there are plenty of times when I feel the need to give myself a kick in the behind, to jolt myself out of the swamps of Weltschmerz into . . . well, something more helpful or active. 

There's a dangerous pull for me in Weltschmerz, something akin to the sin of acedia--often rendered sloth but perhaps better a kind of conscious freeze after overwhelm, a protective posture of exhausted cynicism. 

What's the line between pessimism and cynicism, I wonder? I like the description I heard of cynicism as "low hope, low humility"--absolutely certain, certain to the point of arrogance, that there is no hope. Exhaustion, by contrast, is "low hope, high humility." Perhaps that's pessimism as well. Maybe Weltschmerz is "low hope, high visibility."