(no subject)
A Field Guide to Melancholy was found in a cache of ebooks in a torrent I randomly downloaded. I finished it not long ago, and found it a pensive, quietly elegant, winding, slow-burning book whose effect is to both familiarize and hearten the reader with the rich nuances, subtle shades, and strangely beautiful undertones that exist in melancholy.
Reflecting my background in neuroscience and medicalizing moods, I used to think of melancholy as a kind of null state, a void, a lapse in time to be forgotten once I get out of it and rejoin the living; but having read this thing I have revised my opinion to the point that I'm actually proud of being able to access and live in melancholy in ways others don't. Or can't. Like what Salinger once said: "I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy."
This is one of the best books I've read. If melancholy's any part of you at all, you'll like it, and get a lot from it. I've uploaded the PDF to the interwebz because I love it that much.
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From its Guardian Review:
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Melancholy, said Wordsworth, is a "luxurious gloom of choice". Unlike depression, we choose to be melancholy, paradoxically deriving pleasure from feeling faintly sad. "Melancholy slows things, allows for percolation, facilitates solitude and solace for imagination," says Jacky Bowring in this dispassionate defence of the malady, madness, affectation - melancholy has been called many things over the centuries, but somehow eludes definition.
It is not strictly grief or sorrow or mourning, explains Bowring, but a complex constellation of moods. In modern times, psychiatrists have diagnosed it as "abnormal bereavement" or "psychotic depression", inelegant solutions for something that Bowring seeks to reclaim as "a rich dimension of human existence".
She is an advocate of melancholy, convinced of "the benefits of the pursuit of sadness". She rejects the medicalisation of our mental wellbeing by health professionals and sidesteps concerns about a global increase in mental illness by insisting that melancholy is not depression. Only once does she ask the pertinent question: "Is the increase in melancholy an authentic response to the pressures of contemporary existence, where it might be considered a pervasive mood?" Could it be that the politics of fear creates a media-induced state of national melancholy? And if so, to what end?