The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheThe Sorrows of Young Werther Gönderileri
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“What wretches they are, those who take advantage of the power they have over the heart of another,” I said, “and rob him of the simple joys within him! Not all the gifts in the world nor any favor can compensate for a moment of one’s personal pleasure that has been made bitter by the envious ill temper of this tyrant of ours!"
You called ill humor a vice,” he said. “Wouldn’t you say that was exaggerating?”
“Not at all,” I replied. “Anything that does harm to oneself or one’s neighbor deserves to be called a vice. Isn’t it sad enough that we cannot make each other happy? Must we rob one another of the pleasure every heart can sometimes provide for itself? Show me the person who is ill-humored yet good enough to bear it alone, without destroying the happiness around him. Isn’t ill humor actually an inner annoyance with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves, and isn’t it somehow always connected with the envy that is egged on by our own foolish vanity? We see happy people whom we are not making happy, and we cannot bear it.”
Now there is nothing that irritates me more than when people torment each other, especially when young people in the prime of their lives, who should be open to all joys, spoil the few good days they have with a dour mien and only find out too late that they have wasted something irretrievable.
July 1st
My poor heart, which is worse off than many a heart wasting away on a sickbed, tells me what Lotte must mean to a sick person. She is going to spend a few days in town at the bedside of a worthy woman who, according to the doctor, is about to die. He wants Lotte at her side during the poor creature’s final hours.
Of course, he found my behavior undignified for a man of my intellect. I could tell by the way he turned up his nose at the whole thing. I didn’t let it bother me, but as he went about his more sensible business, I rebuilt the children’s house of cards, which they had toppled; whereupon he went about town telling everyone that the magistrate’s children had always been wild, but now Werther was ruining them completely.
It is truly marvelous—when I came here first and looked down into the valley from this hilltop—how the entire region attracted me. There…a little forest land…oh, to lose oneself in its shade…. There, a mountaintop…oh, to see the panorama from it! The rolling hills and enchanting valleys…I yearned to lose myself in them.
I would hurry down, but return home without having found what I had hoped to find. Distance is like the future. A vast twilit entity lies before us, our perception is lost in it and becomes as blurred as our eyesight, and we yearn, ah, we yearn to surrender all of our Self and let ourselves be filled to the brim with a single, tremendous, magnificent emotion, but alas…when we hurry to the spot, when There becomes Here, everything is as it was before and we are left standing in our poverty and constraint, our souls longing for the balm that has eluded us. Thus the most restless vagabond yearns in the end to return to his native land and find in his cottage, in the arms of his wife, with his children around him, and in the occupations that provide for them, the joys he sought vainly elsewhere.
Then I left her, with the request that I might see her again that very day. She agreed, and I rode over to see her. Since then sun, moon, and stars can do what they will—I haven’t the faintest notion whether it is day or night. The world around me has vanished.
If an accident or some disaster surprises us when we are enjoying ourselves, it naturally makes a stronger impression on us than usual, partly because of the contrast, which makes itself keenly felt, but also—and all the more strongly—because our sensibilities are open wide to all feeling and we can therefore be impressed more acutely.
Lotte was about to reply, when we had to separate for the figure eight, and I thought I could detect a certain reflectiveness in her features when our paths crossed again. “Why shouldn’t you know?” she said as she gave me her hand for the promenade.
"Who is Albert?” I asked. “If I may be so bold as to inquire."
We took a few turns around the ballroom to catch our breath; then she sat down. The oranges I had managed to procure for us—they were the last ones left—were most refreshing, except for the fact that I felt a stab in the region of my heart every time she graciously gave a piece to a greedy girl sitting next to her.
I asked her for the second contredanse. She replied that she could give me the third and with the most engaging frankness assured me that she liked to dance the allemande. “It is customary here,” she explained...
I could not take my eyes off her dark eyes as she chattered; I could not look away from her animated mouth, her bonny cheeks; I was lost utterly in the infectious good spirits of everything she had to say, sometimes without even hearing the words with which she expressed it! That will give you some idea, since, after all, you know me well. In short, when we stopped in front of the pavilion I got out of the carriage like a dreamer, so lost in the twilit world around me that I scarcely noticed the music floating down to us from the illuminated ballroom.