Weltschmerz
VELT-shmerts
n.The weariness that comes from comparing the world as it is to the world as it should be.
GermanEstablished linguistic term
The Weight of the World
At nineteen, Lukas gave up meat, flying, and his father.
The first two stuck. The third took about four years and a great deal of shouting and was, everyone agrees now, the least justified of the three.
His father had said, at a dinner, that the world had always been like this and that Lukas would understand when he was older — which is the single most incendiary sentence available to a parent, and which was also, Lukas concedes at thirty-six, roughly true.
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The feeling had arrived at about sixteen and had not been about anything.