Sadness has a direct line to the soul

February 27, 2008

OURS are ominous times. We are on the verge of eroding away our ozone layer. Within decades we could face severe oceanic flooding. We are close to annihilating hundreds of animal species. Soon our forests will be as bland as pavement. Moreover, we find ourselves on the verge of a new cold war. But there is another threat, perhaps as dangerous: we are eradicating a cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are annihilating melancholia. newman

Melancholy is an essential part of being human, argues Eric G. Wilson. Illustration: Paul Newman

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre shows that almost 85 per cent of Americans believe that they are very happy or pretty happy. The psychological world is abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement and meaning.

What are we to make of this obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment? Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the middle of all the problems that beset our globe, not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences?

I, for one, am afraid that this overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness may be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions. 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 or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

I'm not questioning joy in general. For instance, I'm not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I'm not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world's sorrows. I'm not criticising that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I'm not romanticising clinical depression. I realise that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I'm not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the depressed or to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders.

I do wonder, however, why so many people experiencing melancholia are taking pills simply to ease the pain. Of course, there is a fine line between what I'm calling melancholia and what society calls depression. In my mind, what separates them is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that lead 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 (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.

Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treats melancholia as an aberrant state, a threat to our notions of happiness: happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment.

My sense is that most of us have been duped by the American craze for happiness. We may think that we're leading a truly honest existence when we're just behaving as predictably and artificially as robots, falling easily into well-worn happy behaviours, into the conventions of contentment. Deceived, we miss out on the great interplay of the living cosmos, its luminous gloom, its terrible beauty.

The American dream of happiness may be a nightmare. What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins. Our passion for felicity hints at an ominous hatred for all that grows and thrives, then dies. I'd hate for us to awaken one morning and regret what we've done in the name of untroubled enjoyment. I'd hate for us to crawl out of our beds and walk out into a country denuded of gorgeous lonely roads and the grandeur of desolate hotels, of half-cracked geniuses and their frantic poems. I'd hate for us to come to consciousness when it's too late to live.

When poet John Keats was only nine his father fell from his horse and died the next day. A few years later, his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Though Keats nursed her assiduously, sitting up with her all hours of the night, cooking for her, reading to her, she died in 1810, in Keats's 15th year. Keats was assigned to a guardian and soon after taken from a beloved boarding school and apprenticed as an apothecary. He found the work tedious, for during these years, his late teens, he was awakening to the grandeurs of poetry, especially the verse of Spenser and Shakespeare. To complete his training, Keats had to learn surgery. Day after day, he toiled in a hospital, malodorous and bloody, where he witnessed nothing but suffering. As he was turning from surgery to poetry, his first substantial poem, Endymion, was published in 1818. Two of the leading literary magazines of the time attacked the poem for not making sense.

About this time Keats's brother Tom died after a long and painful illness. While attending Tom, Keats met the love of his life, Fanny Brawne, and became engaged to her. However, he soon realised that he would never be able to marry her because he was doomed to fall prey to the same disease that killed his family members. He knew he would die without consummating his ardent love.

One would think that Keats's life would have fostered bitterness in him, but he remained generous in the face of his difficulties. He didn't flee to the usual 19th-century escapes: Christianity or opium, drink or dreaming. Though he unsurprisingly underwent pangs of serious melancholia (who wouldn't, faced with his disasters?), he nonetheless never fell into self-pity or self-indulgent sorrow. Indeed, he consistently transformed his gloom, grown primarily from his experiences with death, into a vital source of beauty. Things are gorgeous, he often claimed, because they die. The porcelain rose is not as pretty as the one that decays. Melancholia over time's passing is the proper stance for beholding beauty.

Keats understood that suffering and death are not aberrations to be cursed but necessary parts of a capacious existence, a personal history attuned to the plentiful polarity of the cosmos. To deny death and calamity would be to live only a partial life, one devoid of creativity and beauty. Keats welcomed his death so that he could live.

In his 1819 Ode on Melancholy he urges us not to alleviate our blues with befuddling chemicals, seek escape through suicide or "drown the wakeful anguish of the soul". Remaining conscious of our dark moods, we may fall into a "melancholy fit", a deep experience of life's transience but also of its beauty. This melancholy fit is a mixed affair. It falls from heaven "like a weeping cloud,/That fosters the droop-headed flowers all." But it also brings rain and nourishment. Indeed, this cloud "hides the green hill in an April shroud".

What can we call this fit but a meaningful experience of generative melancholy, of that strange feeling that sadness connects us to life's vibrant pulses? Alienated from home and happiness, we sense what is most essential: not comfort or contentment but authentic participation in life's grim interplay between stinking corpses and singing lemurs. This fit shivers our souls.

In this tense mood, we are in a position to understand the relationship between beauty and death. Keats urges us to glut our sorrow on a "morning rose" or "on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave" or "on the wealth of globed peonies". He then says that if our mistress shows "rich anger", we should take her hand and let her rave and "feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes". Each of those recommendations features the melancholy soul's experiencing something beautiful but also transient. There is a connection among melancholy, beauty and death.

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. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.

These are not metaphysical claims, not some new age claptrap. On the contrary, these statements are attuned to the sloppy world as it simply appears to us in our everyday experience. When we, with apparent happiness, grab hard on to one ideology or another, this world suddenly seems to take on a static coherence, a rigid division between right and wrong. The world in this way becomes uninteresting, dead. But when we allow our melancholy mood to bloom in our hearts, this universe, formerly inanimate, comes suddenly to life. Finite rules dissolve before infinite possibilities. Happiness to us is no longer viable. We want something more: joy. Melancholia galvanises us, shocks us to life.

Right now, if the statistics are correct, about 15 per cent of Americans are not happy. Soon, perhaps, with the help of psychopharmaceuticals, melancholics will become unknown. That would be an unparalleled tragedy, equivalent in scope to the annihilation of the sperm whale or the golden eagle. With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a nightmare worthy of Philip K. Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing towards such a hellish condition?

The answer is simple: fear. Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grins, then we won't have to encounter the insecurities attendant on dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn't know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer. We don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise to protect us from the abyss.

To foster a society of total happiness is to concoct a culture of fear. Do we really want to give away our courage for mere mirth? Are we ready to relinquish our most essential hearts for a good night's sleep, a season of contentment? We must resist the seductions of mindless happiness and somehow hold to our sadness. We must find a way, difficult though it is, to be who we are, sullenness and all.

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.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Eric G. Wilson is a professor of English at Wake Forest University in the US. This edited essay is adapted from his book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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