Varieties of Melancholy: A hopeful guide to our somber moods

By The School of Life

This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression, rage, or bitterness, it’s a serene, wise, and kindly response to the difficulties of being alive. It steers a mid-way course between despair on the one hand and naïve optimism on the other.



But melancholy is a well-kept secret. Those who feel the pull of melancholy moods tend to stay quiet. We don’t often hear melancholy being celebrated or accorded the respect that it deserves. It languishes unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age.



This book carefully collects and interprets a selection of the most universally recognizable melancholy states of mind, rendering us less confused by our precious yet elusive feelings. We discover the melancholy of Sunday evenings and the melancholy of adolescence, the melancholy of parties and the melancholy of crushes.



Offering a varied portrait of melancholy and its range of emotions, Varieties of Melancholy leads the reader to both insight, acceptance, and self-compassion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The School of Life
• Release date: Aug 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781912891948

The School of Life

The School of Life is a groundbreaking enterprise which offers good ideas for everyday living. Founded in 2008, The School of Life runs a diverse range of programmes and services which address questions of personal fulfilment and how to lead a better life. Drawing insights from philosophy, psychology, literature, the visual arts and sciences, The School of Life offers evening classes, weekends, conversation meals and other events that explore issues relating to big themes such as Love,Work, Play, Self, Family and Community.

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Introduction

There are a great many ways of handling the unhappiness that inevitably comes with being human: we may rage or despair, we may scream or lament, we may sulk or cry. But there is perhaps no better way to confront the misery and incompleteness with which we are cursed than to settle on an emotion still too seldom discussed in the frenetic modern world: melancholy. Given the scale of the challenges we are up against, our goal shouldn’t be to try to always be happy, but also – as importantly – to master ways of settling wisely and fruitfully into gentle sorrow. If we can refer to better and worse ways of suffering, then melancholy deserves to be celebrated as the optimal means of encountering the challenges of being alive.

It is key to determine from the outset what melancholy is not. It isn’t bitterness. The melancholy person lacks any of the bitter one’s latent optimism and, therefore, has no need to respond to disappointments with a resentful snarl. From an early age, they understood that most of life would be about pain, and structured their worldview accordingly. They aren’t, of course, delighted by the suffering, the meanness and the hardship, but nor can they muster the confidence to believe that it was really meant to be any other way.

At the same time, melancholy is not anger. There was perhaps crossness somewhere at the outset, but it has long since dissipated into something far more mellow, more philosophical and more indulgent to the imperfection of everything. The melancholy greet what is terrible and frustrating with a weary ‘of course’: of course the partner wants to break up (just as we had finally grown used to them); of course the business is now closing; of course friends are deceptive; and of course the doctor is advising a referral to a specialist. These are exactly the sorts of horrific things that life has in store.

Nevertheless, the melancholy manage to resist paranoia. Bad things certainly happen, but not just specifically to them, and not for anything exceptional that they have done wrong: they are simply what befalls averagely flawed humans who have been around for a while. Everyone’s luck runs out soon enough. The melancholy have factored in problems long ago.

Nor are the melancholic, for that matter, cynical: they aren’t using their pessimism in a defensive way. They aren’t compelled to denigrate everything in case they get hurt. They’re still able to take pleasure in small things and to hope that one or two details might – every now and then – go right. They just know that nothing has been guaranteed.

Because melancholy is based on an awareness of the imperfection of everything, on the perennial gap between what should ideally be and what actually is, the melancholic are especially receptive to small islands of beauty and goodness. They can be deeply moved by flowers, by a tender moment in a children’s book, by an unexpected gesture of kindness from someone they barely know, by sunlight falling on an old wall at dusk.

Where the melancholy suffer particularly is around demands to be cheerful. Office culture may be hard, and consumer society grating. Certain countries and cities seem more indulgent to the feeling than others. Melancholy is naturally at home in Hanoi and Bremen; it almost impossible to maintain in Los Angeles.

The aim of this book is to rehabilitate melancholy, to give it a more prominent and defined role and to make it easier to discuss. A community may be described as civilised to the extent to which it is prepared to countenance a prominent role for the emotion – to accept the idea of a melancholy love affair or a melancholy child, a melancholy holiday or a melancholy company culture. Certain ages – the 1400s in Italy, Edo-period Japan, late-19th-century Germany – have been more generously inclined to melancholy than others, granting the feeling prestige in a way that helped individuals to feel less persecuted or strange when it came to visit. The goal should be the creation of a more melancholically literate and accepting contemporary world.

What follows is a portrait of different kinds of melancholy. The reader is invited to think through their own examples, a task in which we are all potential experts. With melancholy returned to its rightful place, we will learn that the most sincere way to get to know someone is simply and directly to ask, with kindness and fellow-feeling: and what makes you melancholy?

illustration

Nicholas Hilliard, Young Man Among

Roses, c. 1585–1595

illustration

Isaac Oliver, Edward Herbert, 1st

Baron Herbert of Cherbury, 1613–1614

Intelligence & Melancholy

Early on in the history of melancholy, the Greek philosopher Aristotle was said to have raised a question which can’t help but sound a bit smug: Why is it that so many of those who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts have been melancholic? As evidence of a link between melancholy and brilliance, Aristotle cited Plato, Socrates, Hercules and Ajax. The association stuck: in the Medieval period, melancholic people were said to have been born ‘under the sign of Saturn’, the then furthest known planet from the Earth, associated with cold and gloom – but also with the power to inspire extraordinary feats of imagination. There developed pride in being melancholic; such people could perhaps discern things that the more cheerful would miss.

Proud of their identities as ambassadors of sadness, young English aristocrats commissioned portraits of themselves in melancholy poses, wearing melancholy’s characteristic colour (black) and gazing forlornly into the middle distance, sighing at an imperfection that they were smart enough not to deny.

In 1514, Albrecht Dürer depicted the figure of Melancholy as a dejected angel, surrounded by a range of neglected scientific and mathematical instruments. To one side of the angel he placed a polyhedron, one of the most complicated but technically perfect of geometric forms. The angel had fallen into dejection – the suggestion ran – at the contrast between her longing for rationality, precision, beauty and order, and the actual conditions of the world.

If we are to take Aristotle’s question seriously, what is it that intelligent, melancholy people might notice that other, lesser minds may miss? To start a list: how insincere most social occasions are; the gap between what others say and what they mean; the bluster of politicians and corporations; the futility of all efforts to become famous or well thought of; the loneliness that dogs us even within the most intimate relationships; the disappointments of parenting; the compromises of friendship; the ugliness of cities; and the brevity of our own lives.

It would be far too simple to say that dark insights alone can make a person clever. In so far as we can fairly associate melancholy with intelligence, it is because the melancholy person skirts two characteristic errors of weaker minds: rage on the one hand, and naïvety on the other.

Like many an angry person, the melancholy soul knows that things are not as they should be, but, at the same time, they resist the temptation to respond to provocations with fury. They can seek justice, but they are all the while steadied by a ballast of realism. They will not suddenly be surprised by events and lash back at them with viciousness; they have known the broad dimensions of reality from the outset.

illustration

Albrecht Dürer,

Melencolia I, 1514

At the same time, melancholy positions a person ideally in relation to hope. The melancholic do not, like the naïve, imagine that they can have flawless lives. They don’t play the lottery of romantic love or of professional success. They know the odds they would be beating with even a halfway-tolerable relationship and an only-sometimes-maddening job. But this doesn’t have to mean that they can never smile or appreciate what is beautiful or tender. Arguably, it’s their awareness of a fundamental darkness that lends them the energy to pay particular attention to the brighter moments that will at points streak across the pitch-black firmament. The melancholy can be intensely grateful and sometimes giddily joyful because they know grief so well – not because they have never suffered at all. They can be very keen to dance (badly) and to make a great deal out of a sunny day or a perfect meal. A child will laugh because something is funny; a melancholy adult will laugh with greater depth still, because they know how many things are so sad.

Being disappointed isn’t any sort of intellectual achievement, and nor is being merry. The real feat of character is to keep one’s fury in check even though one is a bit broken, and maintain hope even though much is self-evidently wretched. In so far as the melancholy person can lay claim to any form of superior intelligence, it isn’t because they have read a lot of books or dress fetchingly in black. It’s because they have succeeded at finding the best possible accommodation between the infinite disappointments and occasional wonders of life.

Pills & Melancholy

Our culture is not only keen for us to find happiness, but it is also – on many occasions – distinctly intolerant of sorrowful moods. If we start to get down, it may seek to change the subject, recommend a thrilling film, encourage us to go skiing or show us something sugary