Melancholia

I remember one night during college sitting in my friend M's car as she drove me back to campus. We had a nice chat along the way, and even when we got there, she let the car idle while we continued talking.

We found we had quite a kinship - similar personalities - similar dispositions. Under the right circumstances, we treasured responding to life with a certain melancholy. It was rather a romantic thing, as if we had learned it from the Bronte sisters and Dickens. When things got overwhelming, the proper thing was to succumb to the darkness, until such time as it abated and we could return to the world of light, sound and activity. There was a certain bittersweetness to being afflicted this way.

And in society, there is an expectation that people of artistic temperament are prone to spending time wallowing in the darkness. That seems to be where the insights into the human condition that so ennoble the resulting creative work come from.

I never gave any credence to this last idea. I felt that if people of creative genius were afflicted with mental disorder, they created in spite of the disorder, not because of it. And I always felt that the people who came up with this theory of the suffering artist could not be artists themselves.

Well I emerged into adulthood still prone to occasional bouts of this melancholy. I never thought to call it depression, but eventually people began to appreciate that depression was a serious thing and should be treated as mental disease just like other debilitating mental diseases. But I did begin to wish that I could escape having to go through these episodes in the darkness. You know, there were days and sometimes even weekends when I lay on my bed unable to move. That was not good.

Treatment in the way of psychotherapy followed, and changed my life in an infinitely positive way. At one point I even followed a regimen of anti-depressants to help put my brain back in solid working order. Thank God for these drugs, and woe that the great geniuses of days gone by could not have been saved by them, and had to suffer as they did.

Am I still melancholy? Do I still take pleasure in a good stanza of gravestone poetry? Are walks in the rain still one of my favorite things? Do I have a deep understanding of what it means for tears to be my meat? Yes, my friends, there is still much that is bittersweet for me. But one of the great mysterious things is how melancholy and happiness can co-exist for me. Sometimes more of one than the other, but these two mood pugilists are in there slugging it out, happily battling for dominance of my demeanor.