This reminds me of Dr. Johnson's comments on someone's poems, that they were both original and good. Unfortunately, insofar as they were original, they were not good. And insofar as they were good, they we not original.
The imprecise - or at least slippery - terminology is dismaying. "Melancholy ... as I define it, and I'm drawing this definition out of a long philosophical and literary history of the term, is a very active state." This is Humpty-Dumptyism. ('When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.') The term melancholy, like it or not, derives from the theory of the four temperaments (which I actually had a class in; WalterHandren, S.J., late chair of the theology department at what was then St. Joseph's College, thought that the theory of temperaments, if properly understood, worked just as well as depth psychology; experience has led me to believe he was right). Anyway, melancholy was thought to be the result of having an excess of black bile. And the ancients understood that effect of such an excess was depression.
Joy is not "the polar opposite of depression." Elation is. The opposite of joy is sorrow. People who use "self-help books, pills and plastic surgery to feed" their "addiction to happiness" are not, in fact, happy. They are anaesthetized. God only knows what to make of those polls indicating that 84 percent of Americans think they're happy. As the George Carlin YouTube clip I linked to here suggests, plenty of Americans are whiners and worriers. On the other hand, a good many confuse having fun and doing things and going somewhere and buying stuff as having something to do with happiness. In other words, to borrow from Eliot, they distract themselves from distraction by distraction. But real happiness derives from, in Arnold's phrase, seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, which means regarding the hodgepodge of good and bad, joy and sorrow, good fortune and misfortune that life happens to be with as much equanimity - evenness of soul - as one can manage. And that has to be worked at. Genuine happiness doesn't just happen.
Moreover, this business of melancholy and creativity is what Maxine might call sentimental tat. Suffering-artist bullshit. So yes, Professor Wilson is right: We should not banish melancholy from our lives. As it happens, we also can't.
(My friend Jesse Freedman reviewed Wilson's book for The Inquirer. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to it.)
Moreover, this business of melancholy and creativity is what Maxine might call sentimental tat. Suffering-artist bullshit. So yes, Professor Wilson is right: We should not banish melancholy from our lives. As it happens, we also can't.
(My friend Jesse Freedman reviewed Wilson's book for The Inquirer. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to it.)
No comments:
Post a Comment