![]() ![]() This edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy is based on a 43.Introduction to the Project Gutenberg Edition.The Non-Rewritable Disc: the Fateful Impact of Childhood How a Messed up Childhood Affects You in Adulthood Criticism When You've Had a Bad Childhood What We Owe to the People Who Loved Us in Childhood The Importance of Being an Unhappy Teenager Why We're All Messed Up By Our Childhoods ![]() The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered' On Needing to Find Something to Worry About - Why We Always Worry for No Reason The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive Melancholy – when it can be shared – is the beginning of friendship. The more melancholy a culture can be, the less its individual members need to be persecuted by their own failures, lost illusions and regrets. The task of culture is to turn rage and jolliness into melancholy. In them, we find echoes of our own griefs, returned back to us without some of the personal associations that, when they first struck us, made them particularly agonising. There are melancholy landscapes and melancholy pieces of music, melancholy poems and melancholy times of day. It is filled with pity for the human condition. Melancholy is redolent with an impersonal take on suffering. The wisdom of the melancholy attitude (as opposed to the bitter or angry one) lies in the understanding that we have not been singled out, that our suffering belongs to humanity in general. Ansel Adams, Looking across lake, “McDonald Lake, Glacier National Park,” Montana, 1942 To fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, exploration and sloth – and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit. To travel and explore the world and yet to put down deep roots. To be in close knit communities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of society. The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to feel secure, and yet to be free to have money and yet not to have to be beholden to others. We can, in melancholy states, understand without fury or sentimentality, that no one truly understands anyone else, that loneliness is universal and that every life has its full measure of shame and sorrow. It springs from a rightful awareness of the tragic structure of every life. Melancholy links pain with wisdom and beauty. It is impatient with melancholy states, and wishes either to medicalise them – and therefore ‘solve them’ – or deny their legitimacy altogether. Modern society tends to emphasise buoyancy and cheerfulness. It is not a disorder that needs to be cured it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate acknowledgement of how much pain we must inevitably all travel through.Īnsel Adams, Aspens, Dawn, Autumn, Dolores River Canyon, Colorado, 1937 Melancholy is not rage or bitterness, it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are open to the fact that life is inherently difficult for everyone and that suffering and disappointment are at the heart of human experience. ![]()
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