The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

The Absurdly Beautiful Excess of the Romantic’s Soul.

This remains one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. Maybe it was the timing. I mean, definitely that was part of what made that first encounter so singular.

I’ll say upfront: this book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s the tale of a young man who memorializes in letters what ultimately becomes the chronicle of a slow spiral into an emotional pain so total and expansive that it finally swallows his will to live. It’s some of the most passionate, lyrical, reflective prose I’ve ever encountered.

Now, sure, I understand and am sympathetic to the book’s supposed influence on real-life copycats. I also appreciate that some will find the whole emotional enterprise of this main character completely insufferable.

But never have I (or never had I, when I first read it as a young man in my twenties, in the middle of my first real heartbreak)read writing like this. It’s one of those books that expanded my perception of what writing could be. Especially as straight male who has always identified as highly sensitive and intense. Someone that could appreciate privately experienced emotional worlds becoming poignant enough to engulf, poignant enough to produce something like physical pain. This book captured, in words, the completely unfettered and absurd excesses of the sensitive, ocean-deep, romantic soul. And it did so in a way that felt validating, even comforting. Like being understood.

In some way, it also let me take my own emotional excess and watch it expressed and carried to its farthest extreme by a fictional character. Far from pulling me to follow suit, this was therapeutic. It released the accumulated pressure in me, because here was a piece of art I could point to (even just for myself) and let it hold that meaning, hold that time and place in my life, immemorial.

Werther’s end is a depressing one, but I didn’t find sadness or tragedy in it. I found inspiration, even a certain celebration of, and homage to, the sensitive, naive, pure soul of the artist. The artist and the romantic find a home here. And of course, they also find what comes with that: sure, relatable hunger for their own expression, but also a warning about the deadly fog of self-erasing fantasy. Fantasy which, in many ways, is the design of the romantic soul (dangerous or not).