Don writes:

>I don't know where John is coming from on this.  I wasn't talking about
>the excesses of frivolity, sex, or titillation.  My subject is the overt
>displays of people in deep anguish.  All I'm looking for is some foundation
>for it - otherwise, cut it out.

I don't know if it can be cut out.

John Clay in his book Romanticism, identifies the celebration of melancholy
and suffering as two of the hallmarks of the Romantic era, others being
anxiety, eroticism, death, and the occult.

The foundation for it? Clay goes on to suggest that the "Newtonian
conception of the world as a mechanism, which dominated thought at the
time, reduced man from his preeminence to a weak and localized spectator;"
and, writes G.  Gusdorf, "the God of Newton is reduced to a do-nothing
king." People tended to find these revelations very disturbing.  Perhaps
this is why it was the age of virtuosos--people looked toward super-humans
to replace their (supposedly) obsolete God.

Can the adolescent, whose preoccupations are amazingly similar, just "cut
them out," even with all the rationality and reassurance the parent has to
offer?

John Smyth