Recently, I experienced a deep and profound sense of melancholy. The reasons are many and far too numerous to mention in a blog post. In addition to the melancholy, it hit me that someday I will die and, worse, just a few days after I have died there will be no memory of me. Unlike Dickens, or Hawthorne, or even Agatha Christie, nothing I have done will outlast me or sear my name into the world's collective memory. There will be no memorial hung in front of the house I grew up in in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. My name will not grace the masthead of any magazine, like Hearst's still does to this day.
When asked what my dream job would be throughout life, my answer was always being a member of the White House Press Corps. Alas, an unfulfilled dream, as life had other plans for me because I chose the path of least resistance, avoiding the path less traveled that Robert Frost wrote about in his poetry.
My recent path of melancholy was brought about by the sense of sadness and loss, a sense of homesickness and a sense that I do not belong anywhere, because even my writing has become hollow, stealing me of my ambition and my drive. In the midst of the pandemic, one day runs into the next, isolation drives me closer to madness and I begin looking for the solitude Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the edge of Concord, Massachusetts to find, or the peace of the mountains that John Muir sought. There was a time when places like that could bring me peace and solitude.
These days, as I awake every morning in an America I no longer recognize and a world that no longer feels like a safe place, I begin questioning my place in the universe and my impact on my fellow man and I start looking for the nearest escape route. A part of me wants to sit on a porch in Vermont and stare at the stars while the snow falls softly around me. Another part of me wants to immerse myself in the hustle and bustle of Washington, D.C. while I sit at the feet of the Great Emancipator. I feel disconnected and disjointed.
But, in the midst of it all, I only want to remain sane.
Melancholy is an interesting emotion. It is not a form of depression, as some would believe. In one of his many letters expounding his mental anguish, Van Gogh wrote, "One feels as if one were lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well, utterly helpless,” And yet the very melancholy that afflicted him was also the impetus for the creative restlessness that sparked his legendary art.
In his diary, the Danish philosopher and poet Søren Kierkegaard - one of the most influential thinkers of the past millennium - wrote that he often “felt bliss in melancholy and sadness” and thought he was “used by the hand of a higher Power through [his] melancholy.” Nietzsche, too, believed that a certain amount of suffering is essential to the soul.
And yet, the modern happiness industrial complex seems bent on eradicating this dark, uncomfortable, but creatively vitalizing state. Our obsession with happiness could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse.
To be clear, I myself am deeply opposed to the Tortured Genius myth of creativity. But I am also of the firm conviction that access to the full spectrum of human experience and the whole psycho-emotional range of our inner lives - high and low, light and darkness - is what makes us complete individuals and enables us to create rich, dimensional, meaningful work.
Melancholy is not rage or bitterness, it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are open to the fact that life is inherently difficult for everyone and suffering and disappointment are at the heart of human experience. It is not a disorder that needs to be cured; it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate acknowledgement of how much pain we must inevitably all travel through in life.
Modern society tends to emphasize buoyancy and cheerfulness. It is impatient with melancholy states and wishes either to medicalize them – and therefore ‘solve them’ – or deny their legitimacy altogether.
Melancholy links pain with wisdom and beauty. It springs from a rightful awareness of the tragic structure of every life. We can, in melancholy states, understand without fury or sentimentality, that no one truly understands anyone else, that loneliness is universal and that every life has its full measure of shame and sorrow. The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to feel secure, and yet to be free; to have money and yet not to have to be beholden to others; to be in close knit communities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of society; to travel and explore the world and yet to put down deep roots; to fulfill the demands of our appetites for food, exploration and sloth and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit.
The wisdom of the melancholy attitude (as opposed to the bitter or angry one) lies in the understanding that we have not been singled out, that our suffering belongs to humanity in general. Melancholy is redolent with an impersonal take on suffering. It is filled with pity for the human condition.
There are melancholy landscapes and melancholy pieces of music, melancholy poems and melancholy times of day. In them, we find echoes of our own griefs, returned back to us without some of the personal associations that, when they first struck us, made them particularly agonizing.
The task of culture is to turn rage and jolliness into melancholy.
The melancholier a culture can be, the less its individual members need to be persecuted by their own failures, lost illusions and regrets.
With an eye toward the marketable ticker of bad news on which our commercial news media feed, our minds run over a daunting litany of global problems. We hope with our listing to find a meaning, a clue to our unease.
I, for one, am afraid that our 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 am further wary in the face of this possibility: 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 over our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia from the system. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?
Melancholy – when it can be shared – is the beginning of friendship.
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