Let’s be melancholy...

Ok, it’s official. The Christmas season is behind us and it’s time to be melancholy. Either wholly or in part because I sat through 20 minutes of The Daily Show last night, waiting for the laughter to come but it never did. So, while all the comedians out there are still trying to get their bearings (I think they go through the holiday season like John Milton without ever uttering a joke or laughing at one – they need their break), I did the next best thing, namely, switch to a Sex and the City re-run and settle on the couch with a box of tissues.

Yeah folks, that’s my next agenda – make a case for being melancholy. Have you ever had a day, where after all the cheerful how are yous and engaging conversations and effervescent laughter, feigned and unfeigned, you need to go straight from the coat rack to the desk, deliver a monosyllablic greeting to a co-worker, plug in your ear phones, plonk down on the chair and just be sad? It’s called i-need-a-break-from-all-the-cheer and it’s good!

In a world where everything is labeled, it’s only natural that we associate being morose with something “bad”. When there is a crisis someone cries. It’s the most natural thing to do. Yet the immediate human reaction to crying is to stop it. “Don’t cry,” people say gently, thinking they’re being very helpful. Why not? That’s what the lachrymals are there for (excluding their other important job of delivering pleasure to the haughty pink bulb called the onion we can’t do without). Hell, it’s the first sound a human being makes. That can’t be unnatural!

Sometimes, there is nothing better than sitting down on a couch or crawling under a comforter and weeping your heart out – for no apparent reason or for a variety of them. It’s easy too. Settle down with all the goods – namely, a good, weepy situation, a loaded lachrymal gland and some kleen-ex. And cry. Just make sure you do it on your own time; noone wants to watch a sniffly, tear-streaked, mucus spouting human being. While I’m at it, noone wants to watch one yelling into a cell phone or farting loudly either.

Right from the time of Shakespeare’s Jacques (who in my limited knowledge of the bard’s work, is the greatest character ever made) we have attributed a certain trait-like quality to melancholy, making it an inextricable part of personality. But what if melancholy were merely a feeling, that one lapsed into in one’s most pensive state? Melancholy has oft been associated with art – the great poets’ most profound feelings came to the fore when they were sad, composers created masterpieces at their melancholic best and many an artist has brushed a stroke of pure genius in his most dismal state.

In last year’s October issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Wolf Shenk quite eloquently – and after extensive research – says this of arguably a person most famed for his gloom, “Lincoln didn't do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.”

So, why is melancholy bad?

It’s an intense feeling, just like euphoria is an intense feeling or hatred is an intense feeling. It shakes you to your very core and the sheer magnitude of it is very different from your normal state of mind.

Catch-22 has got to be the closest contemporary attestation. One of the most popular books ever written, it is a satirical comedy that cracks up at least half the world. So do dark comedies like Dr. Strangeglove and tragically comic writers like O’Toole. So, what I am really trying to do here is, sell sadness by giving you evidences of how it can be entertaining, how it can be popular and finally, how it can be ‘good’.

Two years ago, my best pal and I started the “Laugh at yourself series”. We decided that if we are not going to have THE life, we might as well laugh at the one we do and be merry :) It includes everything from academic troubles to bad relationships to profound online conversations to dreams that won’t ever come true. And believe me, despite being a saga of all our woes, the inherent irony never fails to crack us up (whoever said Wodehouse was the infallible in the area? You want a good laugh? Look at your life ;)).

So, while sometimes it’s great to laugh away your worries at other times it’s splendid to just let the tears roll....

If this post has left you with the feeling that I am going to slash my wrists, you haven’t got it. So, now go to that corner and cry...

If you still have doubts about it, I’ll leave you to ponder over a few of Shenk’s lines, since I couldn’t say it better: “....what needs "treatment" is our own narrow ideas—of depression as an exclusively medical ailment that must be, and will be, squashed; of therapy as a thing dispensed only by professionals and measured only by a reduction of pain; and finally, of mental trials as a flaw in character....”