Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther told the story of a preternaturally sensitive poet whose impossible love eventually leads to suicide. After it appeared in print young people throughout Europe began imitating Werther's style of dress, talking like him and contemplating Romantic suicide. Many opted to share the fictional character's fate, to embrace his vast yearnings and finally to become tragic heroes in their own eyes. The thought of them always fills me with an immense sadness.

Hedgwick wrote that what makes life genuinely challenging is the "hedonistic paradox"--that actively seeking pleasure is one of the least effective ways of achieving it in the long run.

My high school biology textbook offered an illustration: if an electrode is attached to the pleasure center of a rat's brain and the rat is given access to a lever that causes a discharge to the electrode, the animal will pull down on the lever again and again and again until it dies from hunger and exhaustion. No animal has the human capacity for self-control. But then, sadly, neither does any other animal have our gift for rationalization.

Alejandro Jenkins '01 is a physics and math concentrator in Currier House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.