Deep Thoughts: European despair

From the new issue of the German Nu magazine, which is hunting for the Devil, writer Sybille Lewitscharoff sinks into utter despair: "The body makes its deficiencies ever clearer. Each one of its pores is a sharply illuminated dirty hole. That it has become an object of total punishments is evident in the latest fashions, inspired by concentration camps: Twiggy, tattoos, shaved heads, cremation. Most people die badly. They don't heed God's authoritative call for peace. They have learned the Satanic lesson well: it's all futile. You'll never be able to bring back the realm of the dead, nor to bring the realm of heaven down to you. Insatiable, people claw at the last scrap of life with the help of various apparatus, only to be shoved in the oven in the end." Fuck me with a starvation diet: a writer can still be sitting in Europe eating three square meals a day and plumb the bottomless pit of despair, like they're undergoing the trials of a child soldier or something. Not that I know the slightest thing about Sybille: for all I know she might have cancer of the throat or something totally dire.

Contrast it with Luca Durin explaining the lifespan of a fragrance molecule in the Swiss magazine Folio: "When you spray perfume on your warm skin, it's as though you were shooting with a starting gun at a beach covered with many kind of birds. First the little birds flutter in the air. The larger herons and pelicans need longer. If the beach were a strip of fragrance and the pelican a musk molecule, the beach would have a width of 200 kilometers."

Next time you feel despair coming on, just drench yourself in Chanel No 9.