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    Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
    Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
    Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
    Ebook166 pages3 hours

    Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

    By Eric G. Wilson

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy.

    More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we're supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 22, 2008
    ISBN9781429944212
    Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
    Author

    Eric G. Wilson

    Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, and five books on the relationship between literature and psychology.

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    3/5

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    • 4/5
      Wilson depicts the drive toward constant happiness as a kind of misguided fundamentalist ideal. The melancholic is an individual who looks unflinchingly at the the world, having lived richly enough to know that the response to life is a choice between a beautiful and rich uncertainty and a shallow and simplistic clarity. Happy people do not create great works of art. For that, we are indebted to uncertainty, to despair, and depression, To experience all of these things to experience life versus only pretending at life. Well-written, sublimely thought out. . . but not for the practical minded or those who would reduce all experience to abstractions.
    • 2/5
      I expected to like this book more than I did. I am often exasperated by “happiness-mongers” who think they are spreading cheer and are often spreading irritation. I don't believe that anyone was ever successfully nagged into being happy. Not all happiness-mongers are happy; some just don't want others to waste time being negative that could spent listening to them complain.An underlying problem is the survey that Wilson references. Asking people whether they are happy or unhappy is a silly unnuanced question. That binary choice does not begin to cover the range of human personalities and attitudes. How about "reasonably satisfied" or "aware of my advantages or so-so?" I also recoil from generalizations about large groups of people. According to Census, there are more than 227 million people of voting age in the US. If 85% are happy, that is 193 million people that Wilson thinks he can sum up in a few sentences. I don't find that credible or consistent with my own experience. Interestingly enough, and unconsidered by Wilson, lifetime rates of depression in the developed world vary, but average 15%. He gives no thought to temperament, circumstances, personality, or consideration of what various people regard as happiness. Christine Wicker said of herself "I am an upbeat, cheerful person. [...] I have a perfectly reasonable sense that happiness is fleeting, that death, pain, and destruction could befall me and the people I love at any minute. That's normal, I think." William Bradford and Benjamin Franklin are odd choices as the founding fathers of the vapid and the vacuous. I suppose that if one fancies oneself to be elite, one needs a madding crowd to look down on. The book begins as a rant, which is wearing to read and the latter part is repetitious. Wilson has some nice turns of phrase, but he repeats the same things in different ways. This would have made a better essay. It is unclear what Wilson means by “melancholy.” It is hard to believe that he is unhappy when he seems so smugly self-satisfied and pleased with all the gifts of his melancholy with which he hopes to attract disciples. It is often used as a synonym for clinical depression; he that he is referring to something different, but never says how it differs. It appears to me that it is a slightly morbid Romanticism. He was inspired partly by Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire : Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperment. I call attention to the words “manic” and “illness.” The people that he offers as examples of how melancholy provides inspiration in fact had serious mood disorders. According to Jamison, some worked best when depressed, others when they were manic, in a mixed state, or normal. They also had a high suicide rate, contrary to Wilson's claim that melancholy makes life more precious. Jamison, while questioning the wisdom of eliminating manic-depressive (bipolar) disease, also remarks “it would be irresponsible to romanticize an extremely painful, destructive and lethal disease.” The minority who stop taking their medicines do so because they miss their hypomania, not their depression. Many creative people are normal, and people with mood disorders have periods of normalcy. Wilson does say that he knows this, but in proportion to the amount of space that he has used saying the opposite, the caveat is feeble. While I wish him all the melancholy that he and his allies could desire while wandering through the winter woods or roamin' through the gloamin', he is wrong to distort other people's lives.Wilson oversteps when he “forgives” creative depressives who commit suicide. He has no right, he is not an injured party. Similarly, people argue that depressives should not be allowed anti-depressants lest it diminish their creativity. Arguing that someone should suffer so that others can enjoy the fruits of their suffering is akin to arguing for slavery. Only the person with the mood disorder has the right to choose.
    • 2/5
      Samizdat selected this one, it was slight, hardly philosophical, (you know ,mannnn) made more references to pop songs than any weighty (yeah, I made that distinction) tome and it was over before really beginning. What really sucks is that I bought it new. Any further irony with the thematic is understood and inscribed upon the flesh like the hapless colony campers in Kafka's purview.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      A book with a title like this is irresistible to a pessimistic, curmudegeonly misanthrope like me and I was not at all disappointed. I thoroughly enjoyed the witty, eloquent case Wilson makes to recognize the beauty and necessity of melancholy, a state in which I frequently find myself. Wilson's approach to the subject is more literary and artistic than psychological which I found all the more appealing. This book is an excellent complement to Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided which skewers the positive-thinking movement and industry.
    • 1/5
      The introduction and first chapter of this book are really quite excellent, but it's just downhill from there. In the heart of the book, Wilson spends very little time talking about what he introduces in the beginning -- Americanized pseudo-happiness. Instead, it's just a pretentious admiration of as many melancholy-inspired artists as he can think of. The book is short, but still painful to get through. Do not recommend.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I expected to like this book more than I did. I am often exasperated by “happiness-mongers” who think they are spreading cheer and are often spreading irritation. I don't believe that anyone was ever successfully nagged into being happy. Not all happiness-mongers are happy; some just don't want others to waste time being negative that could spent listening to them complain.An underlying problem is the survey that Wilson references. Asking people whether they are happy or unhappy is a silly unnuanced question. That binary choice does not begin to cover the range of human personalities and attitudes. How about "reasonably satisfied" or "aware of my advantages or so-so?" I also recoil from generalizations about large groups of people. According to Census, there are more than 227 million people of voting age in the US. If 85% are happy, that is 193 million people that Wilson thinks he can sum up in a few sentences. I don't find that credible or consistent with my own experience. Interestingly enough, and unconsidered by Wilson, lifetime rates of depression in the developed world vary, but average 15%. He gives no thought to temperament, circumstances, personality, or consideration of what various people regard as happiness. Christine Wicker said of herself "I am an upbeat, cheerful person. [...] I have a perfectly reasonable sense that happiness is fleeting, that death, pain, and destruction could befall me and the people I love at any minute. That's normal, I think." William Bradford and Benjamin Franklin are odd choices as the founding fathers of the vapid and the vacuous. I suppose that if one fancies oneself to be elite, one needs a madding crowd to look down on. The book begins as a rant, which is wearing to read and the latter part is repetitious. Wilson has some nice turns of phrase, but he repeats the same things in different ways. This would have made a better essay. It is unclear what Wilson means by “melancholy.” It is hard to believe that he is unhappy when he seems so smugly self-satisfied and pleased with all the gifts of his melancholy with which he hopes to attract disciples. It is often used as a synonym for clinical depression; he that he is referring to something different, but never says how it differs. It appears to me that it is a slightly morbid Romanticism. He was inspired partly by Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire : Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperment. I call attention to the words “manic” and “illness.” The people that he offers as examples of how melancholy provides inspiration in fact had serious mood disorders. According to Jamison, some worked best when depressed, others when they were manic, in a mixed state, or normal. They also had a high suicide rate, contrary to Wilson's claim that melancholy makes life more precious. Jamison, while questioning the wisdom of eliminating manic-depressive (bipolar) disease, also remarks “it would be irresponsible to romanticize an extremely painful, destructive and lethal disease.” The minority who stop taking their medicines do so because they miss their hypomania, not their depression. Many creative people are normal, and people with mood disorders have periods of normalcy. Wilson does say that he knows this, but in proportion to the amount of space that he has used saying the opposite, the caveat is feeble. While I wish him all the melancholy that he and his allies could desire while wandering through the winter woods or roamin' through the gloamin', he is wrong to distort other people's lives.Wilson oversteps when he “forgives” creative depressives who commit suicide. He has no right, he is not an injured party. Similarly, people argue that depressives should not be allowed anti-depressants lest it diminish their creativity. Arguing that someone should suffer so that others can enjoy the fruits of their suffering is akin to arguing for slavery. Only the person with the mood disorder has the right to choose.
    • 2/5
      Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric G. Wilson is brilliant in parts, but seriously flawed.This is a small book with a simple thesis: the experience of melancholy is an essential part of the human condition—when it occurs, we should embrace it, not repress it. Wilson claims that if you eliminate melancholia either through medications (like Prozac), or through a forceful cultural bias toward perpetual happiness such as currently exists in America, then life ceases to be authentic, and society fails.Much of the book is one long rant against a contemporary American culture that requires artificial happiness at all times. Wilson shows that our melancholic side is absolutely essential. He insists that melancholy is necessary to connect us to our fundamental self. He claims that to reject melancholy is to reject life. Wilson writes: “A person seeking sleek comfort in this mysteriously mottled world—where love is always edged with resentment and baseness beds with grace—is necessarily required to perceive only small parts of the planet, those parts that fit into his preconceived mental grids… But some people strain all the time to break through their mental manacles, to cleanse the portals of their perceptions, and to see the universe as an ungraspable riddle, gorgeous and gross. Happy types, those Americans bent only on happiness and afraid of sadness, tend to forgo this labor. They sit safe in their cages. The sad ones, dissatisfied with the status quo, are more likely to beat against the bars” (p. 24). [Note: If you found this quote somewhat dense and difficult, be forewarned: this type of prose is typical of the entire volume. Although some of Wilson’s writing is dynamic, rich, and lyrical, I often found it also turgid and unnecessarily arcane.]Wilson goes on to argue that sadness is “the enabler of joy,” and that the “true path to ecstatic joy is through acute melancholia.” You can’t have one end of the continuum without the other. Thus, people who strive for happiness at all times limit their capacity for joy.So far so good—I truly welcomed, enjoyed, and agreed with Wilson’s point of view throughout the first half of the text. But in the second half of the book, I was shocked to see the author dangerously overstepping the boundaries of his academic credentials and making serious mistakes—here, Wilson fails me, and thus my overall rating for his book slips significantly.In the second half of the book, Wilson argues that the experience of normal melancholia makes us creative. To back up his arguments about the connection between melancholia and creativity, the author cites examples using a number of very famous historic and contemporary creative geniuses—artists, he suggests, who derived their creative power from their frequent bouts of melancholia. But that is precisely where his arguments fall. Virtually all the creative geniuses that he cites as examples to support his claims about the connection between normal melancholy and creativity were, in fact, at the far extremes of the continuum, not in the middle. These artistic geniuses suffered either from bouts of deep clinical depression, or they were manic-depressives who experienced both depressions and mania. It is important to note that the author is a professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but a “literary humanist searching for a deeper life.” He makes it clear in the beginning of the book that this work is about the normal mood state of melancholia. He sets out to focus on the middle of the continuum, with happiness on one side, and melancholy on the other. He claims that this book is not about the aberrant extremes of the continuum—the ends where melancholia slips into major depression, and happiness soars into mania. Yet he supports his ideas about normal melancholy giving rise to creativity using examples about artistic geniuses who either suffered from clinical depression or manic-depressive illness.Most of the highly creative geniuses who Wilson uses briefly as examples in the second half of his book can be found discussed in great depth in Kay Redfield Jamison’s groundbreaking book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is considered by most psychiatric professionals to be the definitive expert on manic-depressive illness. Amazingly, Jamison herself suffers from manic-depressive illness and wrote a moving memoir about her life and journeys into madness. Fifteen years ago, she published Touched with Fire, and it instantly became an academic and popular bestseller. It is still in print and is considered to be the fundamental work on this topic. The depth of scholarship and research in this work is astonishing—not only does Jamison know psychiatry; she also appears to have a doctorate-level understanding of world literature, and many other fields of scholarship, as well. Jamison’s prose is exquisite, structured, and easy to understand; in addition, she frequently makes room for elegant lyrical phrasing that leave the reader stunned with their beauty and insight. It is interesting to note briefly how Jamison’s views about the wellspring of artistic creativity differ from Wilson’s. The purpose of Jamison’s book, Touched with Fire, is to explore the compelling association between the artistic and the manic-depressive. The emphasis of the book is “on understanding the relationship between moods and imagination, the nature of moods—their variety, their contrary and oppositional qualities, their flux, their extremes (causing, in some individuals, occasional episodes of “madness”)—and the importance of moods in igniting thought, changing perceptions, creating chaos, forcing order upon chaos, and enabling transformation” (p. 5). She makes it clear that an artistic work “that may be inspired by, or partially executed in, a mild or even psychotically manic state may be significantly shaped or partially edited while its creator is depressed and put into final order when he or she is normal. It is the interaction, tension, and transition between changing mood states, as well as the sustenance and discipline drawn from periods of health, that is critically important; and it is these same tensions and transitions that ultimately give such power to the art that is born in this way” (p. 6). Thus, when it comes to the connection between melancholy and artistic genius, Jamison’s book is by far the more scholarly, accurate, and enjoyable to read. In summary: I enjoyed the first half of Wilson’s book, but found considerable problems with the second half. Wilson’s polished literary rant about America’s overemphasis on happiness and its commensurate societal dangers is well-founded—my problem is that it does not take an entire book to make this point; a magazine article would have been more appropriate.My overall recommendation: read about Wilson’s rant against the American happiness culture on the Internet; then, instead of buying Wilson’s book, buy Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. It has been fifteen years since this book was first published, but it is still in print, and easy to obtain…it is three times as long, costs half as much, and is infinitely more enjoyable.

    Book preview

    Against Happiness - Eric G. Wilson

    INTRODUCTION

    … melancholy is a fearful gift.

    What is it but the telescope of truth?

    —GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

    OURS ARE ominous times. Each nervous glance portends some potential disaster. Paranoia most mornings shocks us to wakefulness, and we totter out under the ghostly sun. At night fear agitates the darkness. Dreams of empty streets flitter through our fitful heads. Enduring these omens, as vague and elusive as the obscure horror they suggest, we strain to think of exactly what scares us. Our minds run over a daunting litany of global problems. We hope with our listing to find a meaning, a clue to our unease.

    We mentally scan the scene. We are currently emitting too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This gas traps the heat of the sun and thus raises the globe’s temperature. Even as I write, the polar ice caps are melting. Within decades we could face major oceanic flooding. Even our greatest skyscrapers, yearning heavenward, could soon be devoured by indifferent waves. We are also close to annihilating hundreds of exquisite animals. These beasts—white rhinos and Sumatran tigers and California condors—have been in the making for millions of years. Within almost a human lifetime our disregard for nature has put these sublime creatures almost into extinction. Soon our forests will be empty of colorful torsos and exotic wings. These formerly teeming groves will be as bland as pavement. Moreover, we now find ourselves on the verge of a new cold war. Nuclear warheads before long will be on the rise again. The fears of the middle of the last century will return. We’ll wonder: Will this year be the last that humans breathe and walk on this time-rending earth?

    I can now add another threat, perhaps as dangerous as the most apocalyptic of concerns. We are possibly not far away from eradicating a major cultural force, a serious inspiration to invention, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are wantonly hankering to rid the world of numerous ideas and visions, multitudinous innovations and meditations. We are right at this moment annihilating melancholia.

    We wonder if the wide array of antidepressants will one day make sweet sorrow a thing of the past. We wonder if soon enough every single American will be happy. We wonder if we will become a society of self-satisfied smiles. Treacly expressions will be painted on our faces as we parade through the pastel aisles. Bedazzling neon will spotlight our way.

    What is behind this desire to purge sadness from ourlives, especially in America, the land of splendid dreams and wild success.? Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, for the innocuous smile? What fosters this desperate contentment?

    These questions of course cut against the grain of what most Americans claim to think. A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least happy. The psychological world is now abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Psychologists practicing this brand of therapy are leaders in a novel sort of science, the science of happiness. Mainstream publishers are now learning from the self-help industry and printing thousands of books on how to be happy and on why we are happy. The self-help press fills the shelves with step-by-step plans for worldly satisfaction. Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. And as I have already noted, doctors now offer a wide array of drugs that might eradicate depression forever. It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.

    Surely all this happiness can’t be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe—not only the collective and apocalyptic ills just mentioned but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns.? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren’t we suspicious of this statistic? Aren’t we further troubled by our culture’s overemphasis on happiness? Don’t we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?

    I for one am afraid that our American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am wary in the face of this possibility: to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful over our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia from the system. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

    I want to get to the bottom of these fears, to see if they’re legitimate or just neurotic grumblings. My feeling right now is that they are valid. This sense grows out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to entertain a craven disregard for the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ongoing ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates in the end that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

    Let me be clear. I’m right now thinking only of this specific American type of happiness. I’m not questioning joy in general. For instance, I’m not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I’m not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world’s sorrows. I’m not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those that hurt.

    Likewise, I’d like to be clear about this: I don’t want to romanticize clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I don’t want to question the pharmaceutical therapies of the seriously depressed. Not only am I not qualified to do this (I’m not a psychotherapist marshaling evidence, but a literary humanist searching for a deeper life), I’m also not willing to argue against medications that simply make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders.

    I do, however, wonder why so many people experiencing melancholia are now taking pills meant simply to ease the pain, to turn scowls once more into smiles. Of course there is a fine line between what I’m calling melancholia and what society calls depression. In my mind, what separates the two is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to ongoing unease with how things are—persistent feelings that the world as it is is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia (in my eyes) generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.

    Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treat melancholia as an aberrant state, a vile threat to our pervasive notions of happiness—happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment. Of course the question immediately arises: Who wouldn’t question this apparently hollow form of American happiness? Aren’t all of us late at night, when we’re honest with ourselves, opposed to shallow happiness? Most likely we are, but isn’t it possible that many of us fall into superficiality without knowing it? Aren’t some of us so smitten with the American dream that we have become brainwashed into believing that our sole purpose on this earth is to be happy? Doesn’t this unwitting affection for happiness over sadness lead us to a one-sided life, to bliss without discomfort, bright noon with no night?

    My sense is that most of us have been duped by the American craze for happiness. We might think that we’re leading a truly honest existence, one attuned to vivid realities and blooded hearts, when we’re really just behaving as predictably and artificially as robots, falling easily into well-worn happy behaviors, into the conventions of contentment, into obvious grins. Deceived, we miss out on the great interplay of the living cosmos, its luminous gloom, its terrible

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