Activity

"It is a glorious summer, and I often sit up in the trees of Lotle’s orchard and take down with a long pole the pears from the highest branches. She stands below and catches them when I lower the pole.” Werther is telling his story, ready and speaks in the present tense, but his scene already has t…

“When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: ‘Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no l…

[...] We might call it a proffering, which has no scientific place: I-love-you belongs neither in the realm of linguistics nor in that of semiology. Its occasion (the point of departure for speaking it) would be, rather, Music. [...]

(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?”)

Accidentally, Werther’s finger touches Charlotte’s, their feet, under the table, happen to brush against each other. Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foot, f…