Deep sadness about the inadequacy of our world seems to be the second stage of the coronavirus quarantine in this country. We seemed to have adapted to loss--loss of loved ones, jobs and income, and the life that we once took for granted. Yet recently riots and demonstrations protesting the latter have been in the forefront of the news as President Trump Tweets "Liberate Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia!" at the same time giving states specific guidelines to open up the country in phases approved by doctors and scientists. Citizens of these states and others have now declared their rights to hairdressers, nail salons, gyms, bowling alleys, stores and restaurants despite the growing number of cases. It's the consumer conspiracy.
And of course art always has a way of reflecting the mood of a people.
Conceived in 1880, Rodin's sculpture The Thinker was originally the crowning piece of the artist's work titled The Gates of Hell based on Dante's Divine Comedy and was first called The Poet. When it became immensely popular in 1904, it was enlarged in the garden of the Musee Rodin, installed outside the Pantheon in Paris and at the sculptor's home in Meudon on the tomb of Rodin and his wife in 1906. It is reminiscent of Dante himself, a free-thinking man grappling with his suffering through poetry. The sculpture, now known as The Thinker, shows a powerful figure lost in thought rather than a tortured soul.
And of course art always has a way of reflecting the mood of a people.
Conceived in 1880, Rodin's sculpture The Thinker was originally the crowning piece of the artist's work titled The Gates of Hell based on Dante's Divine Comedy and was first called The Poet. When it became immensely popular in 1904, it was enlarged in the garden of the Musee Rodin, installed outside the Pantheon in Paris and at the sculptor's home in Meudon on the tomb of Rodin and his wife in 1906. It is reminiscent of Dante himself, a free-thinking man grappling with his suffering through poetry. The sculpture, now known as The Thinker, shows a powerful figure lost in thought rather than a tortured soul.
So why has this amazing piece of sculpture become a celebrated work of art? When people imitate the subject's thoughtful position, what is it that they're attempting to communicate? What deep feeling have they intuited?
As you might have guessed, there's a word for it: weltschmerz, pronounced velt shmerts, and it means literally world weariness.
In the 1830s the word weltschmerz was coined by German writer Jean Paul as he described the poet Byron's sadness about life. This prevailing mood of melancholy was the keystone of the Romantic poets who expressed their long-suffering struggle for individualism and personal freedom in poetry.
The barometer for the spike in usage of the word weltschmerz is the country's level of strife and transition after a conflict marked by anxiety and frustration: WW I, the Spanish Flu epidemic, WW II, the Viet Nam War, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the Iraq War, and now the Coronavirus Covid-19.
The barometer for the spike in usage of the word weltschmerz is the country's level of strife and transition after a conflict marked by anxiety and frustration: WW I, the Spanish Flu epidemic, WW II, the Viet Nam War, the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the Iraq War, and now the Coronavirus Covid-19.
In Germany in the 1980s, weltschmerz was mentioned before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the UK experienced a period of weltschmerz after months of agonizing over Brexit. The despair that people the world over have felt about the environment, poverty, deforestation, health, security, and economic woes evokes shades of this word, but no one has come up with a better one. Angst? Ennui? They somehow miss the mark.
Today a spirit of melancholy has filtered through the quarantine and managed to infect a number of people who have not been able to adapt well, understandably so with good reason. The security of an income means taking care of not only oneself but also one's family, the most honored tenet of human society. When suddenly, through no fault of one's own, the ability to perform that treasured duty is taken away, melancholy inevitably sets in. Add massive sickness and death, and you have weltschmerz.
And now the question is, how do people get through this world-weariness, this weltschmerz, and will we learn from it and change our behavior? There most likely isn't a soul on the planet who hasn't thought about it and posed this question, but I'm adding three more ideas to the pile for your consideration:
1. Try to develop tolerance for uncertainty and become more open to new challenges. Jung tells us the more comfortable we are with ambiguity, the more able to cope and feel contentment we will be.
2. Learn how to be alone, face yourself, and set aside time to invite introspection. While meditation is helpful, the point here is to allow thoughts about all aspects of your life to mill around in your brain. You can't learn who and what you are if you don't pay attention to yourself.
3. Recognize the needs of others and do something, even something small, to make someone's life better. Research tells us when we do something good for others, our old brain thinks we're doing it for ourselves, creating positive feelings.
Weltschmerz is a natural consequence of desperate times, but if we've learned anything, we know this: It's the hard times in life that make us better than we were.
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