I came across some notes I made about three and a half years ago, in an old desk drawer, pertaining to my observations of Doug's ex-wife as she was then. Doug's ex-wife of course is not now what she was then, given the constant corrosion of pharmaceuticals on those fragile cerebral cells, but essentially it still holds true.
Not only for Doug's ex-wife, but for primitives such as Pedro Picasso.
There's an untranslatable word in German, weltschmerz, which describes many primitives to a tee; not all of them, but primitives such as Doug's ex-wife, Pedro Picasso, Oscar Wilde (the "Cyrano" primitive), the grazing primitive (the "jgraz" primitive), the Bostonian Drunkard, the packing mama primitive (the "Pachamama" primitive), the skumbag primitive, the kaput primitive (the "kpete" primitive), the Swanson's TV dinner primitive (the "DavidSwanson" primitive), the carpetbagging maternal ancestress (the "Raven" primitive), &c., &c., &c.
The closest one can come to weltschmerz is "a gloomy, romanticized world-weary sadness, experienced most often by privileged youth."
Of course, youth left these primitives some decades ago, but the attitude's still there.
In Germany, after 1870 and the prosperity that accompanied industrialization, there arose a certain sort of youth, perhaps the progenitors of the hippies nearly 100 years later. They tended to be middle-class and above, and thought themselves "artistic" and "aesthetes," "too good" for normal mundane ways of earning a living, "too sensitive" to endure the hardships of labor at all.
They wandered all over Germany, playing guitars and camping out in the open; stealing meat and bread from honest peasants, destroying property of honest people, and of course were supported to one degree or another by the wealth their parents had acquired.
They were often the sons and daughters of rich people, who did not have to worry about hunger or a roof over their heads, and so were free to languish in sorrow, picturing themselves as "victims."
But then after August 4, 1914, they all suddenly evaporated, as they had never even been.
