Melancholy II

I do not prefer my melancholy, but I cannot keep from praising the immaculate landscape of subjectivity it helps me see, and this cannot be experienced in any other state as solidly and deeply as when in the mode of melancholy; it is like a man who is tortured every so often, but on a mountain-top that overlooks a breathtaking view, so transcending for him that he continually oscillates between being ravished by the view and being conscious of his tormentors. But the metaphor is not entirely appropriate; it is not physical pain that is the problem when in sorrow, but psychological. We shall never sacrifice our sorrow, for it is sorrow that is the primer on which all colors of life find their accentuation; it is this black backdrop of sadness that this ground of repetition rests -- repetition understood in the transcendent sense, as getting the world back you have once lost -- and who could dare whisper his way back into pure existence, crawling up the rope of happiness, bit by bit, until he retrospectively realizes he has it, without the joy of capturing it, when repetition unveils the strong rush of euphoria at every moment joy strikes us -- a song we hear, a smile we see, a thought that evokes our laughter, and there we feel her hiding cunningly in the foreground: joy, joy, joy. Our sorrow may wade perpetually in the sea of our souls at these moments, but the contrasting joy of repetition does stand as a mark against it, and it is this mark that we dedicate our lives. To attempt to escape sorrow is twofold madness: firstly because it holds for us the potentiality for the greatest spurts of happiness we know, and most importantly because we cannot do it by fiat -- it is the striving to escape it that causes the greatest pain.

But melancholy must be consummated, and again, nobody would dare prefer it to a life of happiness. Melancholy falters being, and that is the essence of it. In being drawn towards reflection, melancholy is the magnifying glass of despair, for reflection is the branches that constrain one's becoming-alive, one's transition towards being; but this is positive, albeit in a negative light: it helps to grasp the depth of one's weakness, one's shallow defiance in refusing the eternal -- that is, our pre-packaged happiness as possibility, our hope, the refusal to follow which leads us to despair, the ideal by which we must strive in order to continually become ourselves, which I cannot help but call that most excellent of cosmopolitans: God. A man longs for a girl that his reason knows he cannot have, and this longing constitutes his unhappiness, his melancholy -- all melancholy has roots -- and while it may reveal itself deviously by making it appear that melancholy shares the same root-structure as despair, this is far from the case -- one's sadness as sadness is not necessarily a mode of despair; it is possible in every way imaginable to negate one's despair while continually affirming the hope of the eternal in one, thus it is possible to be happy, while remaining -- sad. Thus it says in Ecclesiastes: a sad face may hide a happy heart. Happiness spings from within, from an eternal center -- a center that we can control; sorrow acts as a catalyst on this happiness, but it works from a different direction: it consumes from outside, towards a center that can never be swallowed like it can be when we twist our wills toward the nonexistent goal of despair.

The important thing -- the absolutely central idea -- is to keep moving, for melancholy, as touched on, acts as an anti-catalyst in drawing us to the nothingness of reflection and thus simultaneously keeping us from striving for the eternal and becoming ourselves -- keep moving, but not in the direction of feeling, but aimed at the eternal; feeling will only leave one in a transitory diversion from one's despair, and as soon as that fleeting episode of seeming happiness has subsided, there lies with more intensity the great abyss of despair at one's feet, strengthened precisely by negative repetition -- that is, the contrast-effect into non-being.