A great read this morning in the Chronical Review (at least once you ignore the armchair politically correct and irrelevant trivialities about the ecological apocalypse in the making) on the value of…melancholy. Yes, that’s right melancholy. I find some of the author’s reflections very intriguing. Here are a few passages :
I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?
My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.
Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.
The article is in fact an excerpt from a newly published book with the battle cry title Against Happiness which I would be willing to give a closer look. But I prefer over this or any other new book (and I would recommend to anyone at anytime of the day, the absolute classical on the subject), Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy .
