Saturday, December 28, 2013

New word for me: Weltschmerz

Definition of WELTSCHMERZ

1:  mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
2:  a mood of sentimental sadness 
 Came across this word reading the tenth Travis McGee novel, Dress Her In Indigo.   Actually, I kind of like John D. MacDonald's description better:
He...."felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he never lived."
"Lingering nostalgia for the lives he never lived."  Hard to come up with a better description of the feeling that good fantasy can evoke.  Tolkien was the best of all -- a nostalgia for a time that never really happened. 
Anyway, that's the feeling I want to capture in my writing.  It's fiction -- and yet, it's also a life not lived, but dreamed.

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