In Which the Writer Succumbs to Fits of Weltschmerz, Becomes Excessively Maudlin

 

"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
-Franz Kafka (Diaries of Franz Kafka) 

I know it's a bit untoward of me to start a Proust-related blog post with a Kafka quote-- my slipshod, informal literary education again, tangling genres and epochs irreparably in my head-- but I couldn't help it. In his journals, Kafka is recognizably the author of such logical works as The Castle and The Trial, but also a total stranger, prone to fits of numbness and misanthropy, growing steadily more desperate by the hour. Weltschmerz is the word for it, I think-- not just "world-pain," but a sort of homesickness, a longing for some unattainable ideal. Proust describes this feeling often, as does Woolf-- "One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words."

A sinister proposal, considering her eventual demise. I was searching for her diaries recently at my local chain bookstore, and -- although I couldn't find them-- I did locate no less than six biographies of Princess Diana, four volumes on zombie apocalypse survival strategies, and an incalculable number of Fifty Shades of Gray spin-offs. Not that there's anything wrong those sorts of books, of course, not that I have any right to judge their merits. Nevertheless, some small portion of my bibliophilic heart broke to see the few slim volumes Ms. Woolf had on the shelf-- an aging copy of Orlando, a single Mrs. Dalloway erroneously jammed between two romance novels, a few volumes of To the Lighthouse thrown in with gratuitous carelessness. Much aggrieved, I finally broke down and bought Ulysses. More on that later. 

Afterwards, I went home, brewed myself some strong tea, and started doing research on the subject of literacy levels and the amount of people who still genuinely read for pleasure, who are capable of reading for pleasure. The results, summarized here, are more than a little depressing:

• According to the US Department of Education, 1 in 7 adults-- 32 million people-- are illiterate
• 43% of Americans polled by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004  hadn’t read a book all year
• 33% of students tested have reading comprehension abilities so low as to render them unable to understand material printed in an average newspaper.

I suppose the question is-- what now? What does post-modernism even amount to, at this point? No one to listen. A slog, a stagnation. Nearly a century later, and we're still stuck doing Joyce imitations-- O why? Listening to the teenage proto-babble that surrounds me all day, every day, I often find myself wondering what  linguistic tricks Joyce could have payed on our modern vernacular-- el-oh-el, oh-em-gee, hahaha, likeisthislegit, like, reeeally? Then I inevitably realize that it's highly unlikely that my generation will have a Joyce, a Proust, a Woolf. Hyperreal and hyperactive, we worship quick fixes, data-data-data, and who cares about the future, who cares about anything, ever? The Walking Dead is on. A funny cat video is waiting. "Il faut etre absolutment moderne." Hard for me to chatter on about text as an artistic medium when we lack the ability to articulate even our simplest thoughts, when we can scarcely speak.
 
Weltschmerz. Listen, I don't know why I started talking about this, and I don't why I expect anyone to listen to me besides-- I'm too young, too sentimental, too serious to ever really be taken seriously. Rilke supposed writing to substantiate a communion between nature and the self, but his definition seems a bit too simplistic for me, a bit too limited-- I would like to think that some sort of audience must exist, that all words are formulated for the purpose of communication, if even a liminal, subconscious kind. Now, the audience is dwindling, and writers are forced to ask themselves a few crucial questions-- who exists to communicate with, if there is no one left to listen, no one left to care? What worth have words addressed to the void?