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I intone, within myself, the exalted hallucination of closure; a vainglory of abnegation seizes me (renouncing love but not friendship, etc.),

And in the center of this little society, at once an ethnological village and a boulevard comedy, parental structure and comic imbroglio

The image is peremptory,

(A British lord, and subsequently a bishop, blamed Goethe for the epidemic of suicides provoked by Werther. To which Goethe replied in in strictly economic terms: “Your commercial system has claimed thousands of victims, why not grant a few to Werther?”)

whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses,