Werther is middle-aged

The doctor benched me for a few days. I did try to tell him that it wouldn't do anybody any good, but he had a point. Anyway, doctor's orders left me with a little time on my hands, which only activated that giga-tiny voice of restless mental preoccupation that resides somewhere in my brain (and/or mind). The result? At 11pm on a Saturday evening i was in the library checking out Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as part of a second-reading on-going project.
I read the book a quarter of a century ago. As soon as i finished the Goethe original, i went on to read Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, a book that was for me a revelation, at that time. What Barthes did in his book was to simulate the lover's discourse, by a process that involved the I of the lover without the crutches of a metalanguage for the presentation of the consciousness of the amorous subject. Barthes's A Lover's Discourse had a profound effect on me, as it legitimized the consciousness of the amorous subject as a practically self-defining entity and confirmed the ultimate alone-ness of the lover. I had personal reasons to identify with the amorous subject, especially when the license to identify came from no other than Barthes himself.
My second reading of Werther is very different; a quarter of a century later, young Werther seems neurotic and narcissistic. I have yet to decide whether he is mourning the loss of the loved object (which he never had) or the impoverishment of his ego. But it's not really the second reading that comes as a shock to me; after all, my ToK students did 'accuse' me recently of believing that love is just another brain chemical. It's the total disparity of my two readings that i find shocking.
Interestingly (and in my defense), Goethe distanced himself from Werther, a work that brought him fame and success. It is possible that the autobiographical elements of the work were a source of embarrassment for Goethe after Werther became popular. Or maybe the middle-aged Goethe had to distance himself from Werther which did not show "the mastery that is revealed only in limitation, the freedom that law alone can give us."
Maybe by writing this entry, i am trying to distance myself from my first reading without any embarrassment, justified or not, about how i felt back then since, to quote Goethe, "it must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him" (or her, i add).
Having just passed the Goethe test, all i need now is for the doctor to let me play ball again. With my students, not with Werther and myself.