Weltschmerz

Another vocab word reflecting how many of us are feeling right now. To wit: World Pain.

I mean, many of us are feeling like this right now as we look around us and/or at any of the news in the US, right? Of course, many of us have been feeling like this for a long time now. I don’t want to dwell on that necessarily, as it seems the majority of essayists across the genres are glutting our reading feeds with such feelings.

But I want to actually do a little linguistical comparison on this wonderful German compound word instead.*

The qi definition above is different in several subtle ways than the one from ‘grandiloquent’ that I had found for an old blog post back in the Before Times. I feel like the qi one is more direct and bitter, and the other is more wistful and sentimental. Of course, the German is (and please, you German speakers, do correct me if I’m wrong):

welt - schmerz = world - pain

So the ‘world-weariness’ part of the Grandiloquent definition tracks. But other than that, the qi definition smacks of all the jaded bitterness we’re certainly all feeling, right? It’s less a disappointment of the world than an active knowledge that the world is going to fuck me and there’s nothing I can do about it. Which. Yeah. Feels that way, even for me who has many privileges others don’t. To me, it’s less of a wan ennui sort of word and more of a … fuckity fuck of course _fill in the blank_ happened! Of course it did…

*Man, the German language has such long and elaborately expressive words for emotional states, don’t it? It’s glorious. Makes me want to fire up my DuoLingo.

It’s funny* how much more of a rough time of it I was having before the Plague. It’s not like I have suffered no trauma from the Plague times, like how Culture Study wrote recently, but man I was on the rocks back then, and not in a good way. These days, I’m suffering from all the whatever undiagnosed anxiety causing mental health issues I’ve always had going on, but also the latent trauma from lockdown. That’s the poignant bit of the Culture Study treatment that she discussed so well: we’ve all really been through it, and many if not most of us haven’t made a point of trying to heal from it, as we don’t think we surely had it so bad as others, and so aren’t in need of healing. But like. Dude, that whole thing fucked us all up royally, and there’s more than one new pandemic spreading right now, which a) we’re not dealing with, and; b) since at least in the US, all our institutions that studied and told us about the level of the danger and etc. have all been, or soon will be, eradicated, we will be even less prepared to survive it. Which, if that doesn’t instill weltschmerz on you, I don’t know what will.

*not funny: ha-ha; funny like a clown tastes funny.

But it’s funny: I look back on an old ‘Weltschmerz’ blog post I made in like, 2019. I was struggling with the same shit in a different way than what I’m doing now: grading work in my intensive adjuncting job, writing many articles for various websites (this time, just Substack, and that not for pay, at least not many of my subscribers are paid, so), and choreographing fights and burlesque numbers. It’s still what I do, it’s just… is it even different? It feels like less of a struggle. Still hard, still a challenge, but.

Maybe, on this Valentine’s Day, I can chalk it up to the fact that I have an amazing partner who's now a FIANCÉ! …and it is different, isn’t it, because of him and his kids. Or, as he calls us: his 3 of Cups. Because no man (or woman, or enby) is an island.

That’s an image to leave you with.