LACHRYMAE RERUM
‘Depression’, Susan Sontag tells us, ‘is melancholy minus its charms…’ I’m fortunate in not being prone to depression as a condition. In spite of all attempts to affect a gloomy fatalism in the face of adversity, an irrepressible optimism informs my immediate & subsequent reactions. (That even my closest friends believe that I’m pessimistic to a degree that makes Eeyore look euphoric is indication of how well I conceal my witless optimism).
I am given, however, to deep melancholy on occasions. It’s a tendency that has been with me for as long as I can remember. Almost invariably it’s provoked by a sudden, frequently acute sense of the finite nature of all things & the passing of sequences of experience from inception to inevitable decay. Even as a young child I was drawn to literature that dealt with the passage of events within a specific time frame. When re-reading favourite books – The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, Le Morte d’Arthur - my enjoyment was always tempered by a gathering awareness of the approaching imminence of the conclusion & the characters’ passage into a time somehow less elevated & intense.
This awareness was never more pronounced than in my repeated, almost obsessive reading of Morte d’Arthur. However much of a reprobate Sir Thomas Malory actually was, he certainly possessed a profound apprehension of the fragility of glory days & the inevitability of a return to the mundanity that encloses them. As the Grail stories that form the climax to the tales of the Knights of the Round Table draw to an end with the death of Galahad & the withdrawal of Percival to a monastery, so the passing of the Realm of Logres comes about. The narrative genius behind this collection of free standing but linked stories is most evident in the dereliction & collapse of the court at Camelot, brought about by doomed love, jealousy & treachery. But for me, even as a pre-teen reader, the true majesty was in the sustained melancholy of the protracted ending. The court is scattered; the main protagonists are either dead or self-exiled; there remain only Arthur & his faithful retainer Bedivere. There is the final act - the casting of Excalibur into the lake, managed only after a resonant three attempts. And then Arthur, nursed by a hooded queen - possibly his repentant sister, the erstwhile sorceress Morgan Le Fay - passes in a barge to the land of Avalon. And for me, locked into the profound melancholy that came with the contemplation of that which has passed & cannot be restored, only the hint contained within the words on Arthur’s tomb brought comfort – HIC JACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS.
No doubt a rigorous course of analysis would flush out a brace or two of childhood traumas or a pattern of parental neglect – defined as such, anyway, by today’s exacting standards. Or maybe more arcane investigations might reveal a previous existence in precarious times thus accounting for my hypersensitivity to intimations of mortality. All I know is that, although melancholy remains in late middle age a lens through which sometimes I view the world, I wouldn’t be without its darker focus. It feeds my poetry, enhances my response to music & protects me against the growing trend towards mindless good cheer as a default reaction in these complex & troubled times.
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“Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad”
Victor Hugo
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All is change; all yields its place and goes.
Euripides
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"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!"
Anatole France
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“Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth and therefore to such as are discontented, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected it is
a most present remedy”
Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy)
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"Aristotle said melancholy men of all others are most witty."
Robert Burton (Ibid)
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"There 's not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy."
Thomas Hood (Ode to Melancholy)
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"Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
Brought from a pensive though a happy place."
William Wordsworth (Laodomia)
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"Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe."
Henri Frederic Amiel
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But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
John Keats – Ode to Melancholy Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows. What are those blue remembered hills? What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. A. E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad)
10:49:20 PM 
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