You've Got Mail, from Werther!

If you have, like me, read and loved The Sorrows of Young Werther you will enjoy this. (Gosh! Can't believe I was railing against the evils of romanticism just a couple of posts back. Also pontificating on the virtues of stoic and ethical life as against an aesthetic life!! Scroll down on this post if interested...)

Anyway, you can register yourself on http://www.the-sorrows-of-young-werther.com/ and you will get emails filled with sorrow and philosophical musings from young Werther himself in your mail box daily! The original novel, for those who are not familiar, is written in an epistolary format, so this is actually meant to be read that way. Of course if you are impatient you can always read the whole novel here.

Here's one of Werther's musings as a sample:

That the life of man is but a dream, many a man has surmised heretofore; and I, too, am everywhere pursued by this feeling. When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation, whilst we amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes, -- when I consider all this, Wilhelm, I am silent. I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my senses, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world.