One Often Calms One's Grief by Recounting It

Melancholy 101

“That’s just the way it is. Things will never be the same.” Jessica Mack? 6/1/02

Don't cry because it's over, Smile because it happened.

Shall you cry because roses have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses?

When the heart grieves over what is has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left. Sufi Epigram

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

“Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.” Henry Van Dyke (American1852-1933)

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.... The persistence which is expressed in the intention of mourning is born of its loyalty to the world of things.

--Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1)

I think that the indefinable space between happy and sad is the most moving and compelling place for an artist to be. If there's anything I consistently strive for, it's a melancholy limbo.”

Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad” Victor Hugo

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness”

There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy.” Shawn Colvin

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. :Carl Jung

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh. Leonard Cohen

YOUR SADNESSES? What’s LOST? What’s LEFT?

When the heart grieves over what is has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left. Sufi Epigram

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character. So, melancholy is morbid only when it occupies too much place in life; but it is equally morbid for it to be wholly excluded from life. Emile Durkheim
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together. John Berger

One often calms one's grief by recounting it. Pierre Corneille

Strengths of a Melancholy

The Introvert | The Thinker | The Pessimist The Melancholy's Emotions

Deep and thoughtfully
Analytical
Serious and purposeful
Genius prone
Talented and creative
Artistic or musical
Philosophical and poetic
appreciative of beauty
Sensitive to others
Self-sacrificing
Conscientious
Idealistic

The Melancholy As A Parent

Sets high standards
Wants everything done right
Keeps home in good order
Picks up after children
Sacrifices own will for others
Encourages scholarship and talent

The Melancholy At Work

Schedule oriented
Perfectionist, high standards
Detail conscious
Persistent and thorough
Orderly and organized
Neat and tidy
Economical
Sees the problems
Finds creative solutions
Needs to finish what he starts
Likes charts, graphs, figures, lists

The Melancholy As a Friend

Makes friends cautiously
Content to stay in background
Avoids causing attention
Faithful and devoted
Will listen to complaints
Can solve other's problems
Deep concern for other people
Moved to tears with compassion
Seeks ideal mate

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

In Praise of MelancholyBy ERIC G. WILSON

American culture's overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life Poem: Ode on Melancholy Excerpt: Born To The Blues

APewResearchCenter poll shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy. The psychological world is now abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Psychologists practicing this brand of therapy are leaders in a novel science, the science of happiness. What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment? 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.I'm not questioning joy in general.. there is a fine line between what I'm calling melancholia and what society calls depression. what separates the two is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to continuing unease with how things are— persistent feelings that the world is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression 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.

Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treats melancholia as an aberrant state, a vile threat to our pervasive notions of happiness— happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment. Of course the question immediately arises: we miss out on the great interplay of the living cosmos, its luminous gloom, its terrible beauty.Our passion for felicity hints at an ominous hatred for all that grows and thrives and then dies. Things are gorgeous, he often claimed, because they die.

the relationship between beauty and death Life grows from death; death gives rise to life. This insight animates melancholy, makes it vibrant. But it also intensifies the pain, for it emphasizes this: Everything, no matter how beautiful, must die. Rather than flee from this difficult position, the melancholic appreciates things all the more because they die. In enjoying the beauty of the world, the melancholic himself wants to create beauty, to commemorate his resplendent experience of earth's transient gorgeousness.Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.

Melancholia pushes against the easy "either/or" of the status quo. It thrives in unexplored middle ground between oppositions, in the "both/and." It fosters fresh insights into relationships between oppositions, especially that great polarity life and death. It encourages new ways of conceiving and naming the mysterious connections between antinomies. It returns us to innocence, to the ability to play in the potential without being constrained to the actual. Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. To foster a society of total happiness is to concoct a culture of fear. Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: We are forever incomplete, fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures— we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials— make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be only a fragment is always to strive for something beyond ourselves, something transcendent. That striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous— it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors— it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.

Eric G. Wilson professor of English at WakeForestUniversity. Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.