Bittersweet: A Melancholic Treatise
Grief. Heartbreak. Longing for your loved ones. That's real.
“It is more civilized to laugh at life than to lament over it.” — Seneca
Check this.
You envision you and your university friends conquering life together as you did in those cold, long nights, studying and exchanging crude banter.
But then life after school has broken you guys apart like melted cheese and you only see each other once every other year, mouldy — reeking of adulthood burdens and complaining of some disease you suspect will kill you one day.
Sure, you're happy for them, their families, the successes of their unique paths. But you miss what you had and you choke at the fact that you'll never experience such pure camaraderie. Such love and loyalty...ever again.
Frustrated in loneliness, you might think of the lover that, if they hadn't lied, if they had been a little bit keener with their intentions, you would still have someone you're excited to party with and love. Someone you could enjoy different phases of life with and roast their foreheads. Granted, they would be a little fucked up, a pain in the ass — but you'd have had fun. Lots of fun.
However, after the bitterness fades you realize breaking up with them proved how much self-respect and love you have for yourself. How much, even if you long for love and affection, you don't have such a low sense of self-worth that you'd stick to what's bad for you just because it was familiar.
Perhaps you imagine a scenario where your parents could still be around to see your achievements. Where you'd see them struggle to dye each other's grey hair. But, without lessening the loss, you come to appreciate how their demise fueled your growth and independence.
Maybe you picture yourself working a job you like, not what necessity has forced you into doing. But you use the work ethic and soft skills you learned from the latter to fuel growth in the former.
You feel this longing and outcry for the heavens, but you're painfully thrust back to earth — left to admire the beautiful stars in the moonlit sky.
That's melancholy.
If you're anything like me, you're also drawn to melodic or sad music more than you'd like to admit and to the chagrin of your friends. You find small moments, small acts of love and kindness more fulfilling than anything stupendous but hollow. You might even get a panic attack. Or sob at the thought of not seeing your friends for long.
What I want you to understand is that this doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. Matter of fact it means you're more empathetic, intelligent, creative and kinder because you're more perceptive and sensitive to the world around you than most people. And if you look carefully, you can see traces of yourself in the lives of Van Gogh, Kafka, Camus, or Dostoyevsky.
The culture wants to enforce positivity on you. But what's popular isn't real.
Grief. Heartbreak. Longing for your loved ones. That's real.
You can't always be in high spirits — although you must endure what must be dispatched with courage.
Melancholy isn’t to be fought as it's not weakness; it's the soul's soft and piercing melody that, if one dared listen, could be enjoyed.
But there's a caveat.
For melancholy to help us explore and enjoy the array of life experiences, it has to be born with dignity, strength, and an excellence of mind. It has to be adorned with beauty.
Not a pathetic weakness.
You may cry if you can't help feel overwhelmed, but you can't pity yourself as that would be negating life itself.
Melancholy teaches us to love life as it is by enforcing inevitabilities that we can't escape, or those we soon tire from escaping.
You get to appreciate that life isn't all about joy, sadness is also a part of it that we can embrace and learn to live with. Life is not always about having our way, there's a time and place for that, it's, rather — to be experienced in all its forms. To be felt with a light heart.
Learning how to love melancholy is therefore a good therapeutic exercise for love is surrender, killing the ego to feel something greater than ourselves. Something sublime. And that's why melancholy is a kind of dark beauty, an alchemy, as it’s through feeling the depths of emotional pain, longing, and loss that we usher in change in the form of new beginnings, new people, new opportunities, strength, and new phases of existence. We get to persevere through all the motions and experience ourselves living as new people, people we’d never think we’d be, on the other end.
Through processing this dignified sadness, you get to enjoy the texture of reality for what it truly is, a rose that's annoying because it’s prickly but would be something we wouldn't love as much — as it would be something else, if it didn't possess the pricks.
That's why the cure to seemingly incurable melancholy is paradoxically raising its concentration and staring into its abysmal wretchedness undismayed through mediums such as art, music, or seeing sick people. Only then can you enjoy heaven on earth.
However, beware the addictive pull of melancholy, lest it becomes a brooding personality that's not fun to be around.
I'll personally make it a point to avoid you.
The highest wisdom is to live, love, and laugh with the demons.
The Aesthetic Experience
"...aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists, to a large extent, in the fact that, when we enter the state of pure contemplation, we are raised for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we are, so to speak, rid of ourselves." — Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation)
The Stoics were big fans of appreciating the beauty in the world. This comeliness is reflected in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The artful expression of Stoic ideas is why the book still resonates 2,000 years later.
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them…for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.”
In the spirit of washing away the dust of earthly life, these are the three art pieces I found interesting this week. Enjoy.
Exhibit I
Exhibit II
Exhibit III
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Have a great week ahead,
Antonius Veritas.
What I’m listening to
This spoke to me. It was a meaningful read.