weltschmertz

I prefer Steinbeck's East of Eden term, Weltschmertz -- world weariness.

One's lessened desire need not signal, much less be the product of, the fact that, or one's belief that there is less good to be obtained or produced, as in the case of a universal Weltschmertz. Indeed, a frequent added defect of being in such "depressions" is that one sees all the good to be won or saved and one lacks the will, interest, desire, or strength.

If after the "serious" electronic playing of Barber's or Albinoni's adagios, Stringfever had set aside their microphones and speakers and picked up plain acoustic instruments for a second reading of those sad, overwrought "Weltschmertz" songs, the audience might have felt how incomparably more moving they are in their original form.

I don't mean physical pain but Heine's Weltschmertz, or wound in the heart, the kind of pain that comes from realizing that one's vocation is severely flawed, that betrayal is not a hungry carnivore but an insistent rodent, that career effort (the arduous raising of intellectual capital) is rarely rewarded or useful outside one's narrow parish, that the values one cultivates with love and concern too often become society's whipping posts, and that one's true self usually emerges too late.

The second passage indicates that Frame as a child is developing an artistic consciousness of being an observer/outsider to the sad world, a kind of Weltschmertz, and it seems to be more personal because of the sadness and loneliness which belongs more to the narrator than to the world.

Christianity certainly had not palliated this pain for Nietzsche; by his own account, Christianity simply made it worse, turning it into a lurid mix of guilt and duplicity, a Weltschmertz that only he himself could properly diagnose, prognosticate and, finally, cure--through the homeopathic medium of his own aesthetic and intellectual pleasures.