01/07/2020
IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY - Alain De Botton
Melancholy is not rage or bitterness, it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are properly open to the idea that 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 agony we will inevitably have to travel through.
Modern society’s mania is to emphasise buoyancy and cheerfulness. It wishes either to medicalise melancholy states – and therefore ‘solve them’ – or deny their legitimacy altogether. Yet melancholy 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 explore the world and yet to put down deep roots, to fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, s*x 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 our suffering belongs to humanity in general. Melancholy is redolent with an impersonal perspective on suffering. It is filled with a soaring pity for our 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 agonising. The task of culture is to turn rage and fake joy into melancholy. The more melancholy a culture can be, the less its individual members need to be persecuted by their own failures, lost illusions and regrets.