I have had a kind of pervasive sadness for decades, not depression, but emotional weariness. I always was extremely oriented to nature and eventually got to know it better than any other thing I know in existance, but getting so deep into it I found the heart of nature is a coldness, an inhuman indifference to any degree or amount of suffering. It just is, and is vast and full of trillions of things beginning life, suffering, and dieing in this mad cyclone: Juggernaut’s Great Wheel. I have seen too much suffering to be unaffected.
I am still in nature ongoing, I cannot bear be away from it, I am on the water almost daily, I fish a great deal, I garden, I am walking in the woods a lot, I live in the woods, with my animals. Still, I love natural life, but I cannot stop seeing the gratuitous utter cold cruelty of the life of the wild creatures, and feel the inhumanity of nature’s complete lack of any compassion, its utter indifference to life that is burgeoning on it. The only things which keeps us all from feeling this is being in society where there is some humanity, some compassion exists, even if we are not receiving any, we know it exists, as it does not in nature.
Arctic explorers almost all mention this sense of depression from raw nature, the tropic explorers do, how it weigs on them. It is an odd dualism, grandness, beauty, and endless suffering in a cosmos of indifference.
And a couple weeks ago my delicate, tiny, loving, pretty, dog died miserably because of just one second, it was with someone else, loaned as company because they were depressed, and it was run over. I have not ever known this deep a depression. I have had other dogs die in their time, but this one was so fragile, I cared so for it, for a decade, it was like a childlike innocent, and then a bad death. This just nailed me. More than I would ever have expected. Just a tiny fox like dog, I am so sad I cannot stop feeling this utter despair for the loss. But I do know time will heal it, not yet, but eventually, I hope.
The person who had it when it died is crushed, and we are going to the shelter and get her a dog, and maybe me another one, I still have one, but maybe a second one again will be good.
I’m so sorry to hear about your beloved dog. I thought immediately of the words of Dr Ishaq above – “It’s not about curing, it’s about healing”. Nothing can cure loss or make it right, and I think part of us doesn’t want death fixed as if it had never happened – that can feel like a life erased rather than one prematurely cut short. Healing, though, life going on and loss prompting us and the people who care about us to do better things; I think that counts for everything. It sounds like your little dog had a very rich life, and now another dog will be cherished and nurtured and a friendship strengthened by a refusal to let tragedy define it. Your words prove that there isn’t a cosmos of indifference, but one of love. Take care of yourselves like your little fox-like dog would have done, as you and your friend heal.
Sanford, I am so sorry to hear about the sudden loss of your sweet pup. Her (?) life was about so much more than the last minute of it. There may be a heaven, and if so, she’s there.
Oh my, so very sorry Sanford. I do know how you feel and it is very tough to go on. I’ve never really gotten over my own similar situation, it still hurts but what I know is that it’s still better to have them and love them than not to and skip the pain.
Charles Stanhope
3 years ago
Thank you Horatio.
Perhaps this epitaph from Ancient Rome to a beautiful dog called Margarita (Pearl) will cheer both you and Sanford Artzen up? You can find it in the British Mseum.
“Gaul sired me, the shell of the rich sea gave me my name: the honour of that name is becoming to my beauty. Taught to roam unexplored woodlands with courage and to chase furry things over the hills, unaccustomed ever to be restrained by heavy harnesses or to endure savage beatings with my snow-white body: for I used to lie in my master’s and my mistress’s lap and mastered the art of resting wearily on a spread-out blanket. Even though I used to be able to express more than I was entitled to with my near silent mouth- that of a dog! –, no one feared my barking. But I have already met my fate, stricken down during ill-omened whelping – me, whom earth now covers under this little marble plaque”
Margarita .
Last edited 3 years ago by Charles Stanhope
Dougie Undersub
3 years ago
Meanwhile, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders gets thicker and thicker with every new edition and more and more instances of feeling a bit down for perfectly understandable reasons become medicalised.
Phil Bolton
3 years ago
In the current lockdown I’m sure there are many people who have experienced the feelings of melancholy as described above, including myself. Living alone, with health issues, in the middle of a bleak winter, unable to meet friends … these all conspired as a quadruple whammy on my psyche. Thankfully we heading towards the end for what has been for me one of the most testing of my life and one I do not want to experience again.
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
German has an interesting word, “Sehnsucht”…which is translated as “longing”, “yearning” or “nostalgia”. It’s always used with an air of sadness or melancholy because you can’t be with the person/have the thing/be at the place to which the feeling refers. The target of the feeling may or may not be something that existed; a place may be a “Sehnsuchtsort” (Ort = place) even if you haven’t been there. The person experiencing the emotional feels incomplete somehow.
Our English word nostalgia comes from a similar idea in Greek – algia, pain and nostos, returning home – the ache you feel when you yearn to go back to a safer place, but can’t.
When I was a child, I came across a painting by Maxfield Parrish—one of those depicting a Classic garden and gorgeous natural surroundings, at a golden and soaring blue twilight. I was struck so deeply by this—the longing, the joy, the sorrow, the sense that I should BE there.
I was so happy to learn I wasn’t alone in this experience when I read “Surpised by Joy” wherein C.S. Lewis described the exact same sort of feeling; he calls it joy. It’s sehnsucht. It’s hiraeth. It may be a brief glimpse or inner knowledge of Heaven.
Goethe wrote a novel ‘Sorrows of young Werther’ about unrequited love and unfortunately it attracted young men to kill themselves. It is thought it was the beginning of the romantic era where the young were praised for being pale and languid-ennui became a fashionable word amongst the middle classes.The young today seem a bit sad and humour-free. Jane Austen makes fun of it in Persuasion where a young man is grieving for his dead fiancee ,reading sad poems and the like , then promptly ups and marries the first new girl he meets.
I’m German, and what’s interesting about the word Sehnsucht is that it’s a compound. “Sehnen” means longing, yearning. “Sucht” comes from “Siechtum” which means illness, especially long-term incurable illness/ infirmity, and the modern meaning of Sucht is addiction. So, Sehnsucht is an addiction to longing or longing yourself sick. It’s a much stronger feeling than nostalgia, which also exists in German (Nostalgie) and is quite mild by comparison.
Claire D
3 years ago
Thank you Horatio for this.
Rhys Mason-Dunn
3 years ago
A brilliant article, thank you Horatio. Burton attended my grammar school when he was a child and I recall an ancient edition of his book behind a glass case in one of our halls. I haven’t thought about it until I read this, so will look to purchase a copy and read it.
Claire-Lou Sankey
3 years ago
This is utterly beautiful. The nuance you so beautifully express, the ways of seeing, are what is so needed in our world. So much wisdom here.
Linda Jane
3 years ago
Please can anyone identify the painting of the lady in the white dress in a walled garden?
Jethro Bodine
3 years ago
I’m 62. About age 50, and 53, I had what I describe as “an emotional earthquake”. At fifty, it was only rumbles, at 53, it was devastating. I didn’t have psychosis, just a long, intense period of what I can only call “melancholy-angst-intermittent-existential-panic”. It was very tenacious and lasted for years. I described it to others as a mid-life crisis, but maybe it was much more than that. It did involve gerascophobia.
At some point I gave up mentioning it, because, even though it’s rooted in concrete experiences and memories, there’s a certain ineffability to it that even the most well-intentioned people couldn’t really understand. I pondered and pondered, reflected and reflected, and searched and searched the Internet. Little my little, clue by clue, I found words, concepts, books, movies, melancholics throughout history, that gradually helped me ease it. As some commenters have already mentioned, “sehnsucht” was one of them. “Weltschmerz” was another. I sought out and read books and watched films and television episodes that allowed me to confront, face and explore my feelings, that contained bits and pieces of them. I guess it may have been a sort of exposure therapy. It allowed me, to some degree, to objectify my feelings in literature, art and film, and to that extent, lessen their grip.
Static, The Twilight Zone
The Guests, The Outer Limits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJs7pZg_ngQ
She
Lost Horizon
You Can’t Go Home Again
Brave New World
The Swimmer
Just to name a few.
I tried to discuss it on a few Internet forums, but I found it pointless and frustrating. Nobody seemed to quite get it, and many nagged me to “get help”, as in psychotherapy. I have serious problems with psychiatry and modern psychology. My melancholy is not “clinical”. I believe these are very much rooted in reductionist, physicalist and secular worldviews, which I don’t share. I see myself as religio-philosophical, and questions of an afterlife and the nature of the self are very deep, mysterious and unanswered for me, and very existentially relevant. Therapists who have atheist or indifferentist-agnostic biases cannot see or feel the big picture that I do, which is very relevant to what questions I must explore and what course I might take. They dismiss them as distractions and try to control the narrative. Therapy/psychiatry/clinical psychology is like modern shamanism. It will work fine for people who’ve internalized the conventional worldview of the society they grew up in. It will not work for the philosopher, the thinker, the doubter.
I’ve had bouts of melancholy as far back as age 14. I’ve also had ecstatic visions of joy, though I think those are pretty much gone now, washed away by time and bitter experience. Now they’re replaced more by hard realism. Right now, I’m working on letting go of many things I’ve clung to for a long time. It’s not easy, and I accept that. I suppose this sounds morose to most people, but actually it’s very therapeutic. A lot of my melancholy has been caused by longing for the unattainable, most recently, the unattainable past. My terrifying, exciting, “barbarian world” as I call it.
I think I’ve made quite a lot of progress on my own, and one thing I’ve avoided is happy, sappy, positivity and optimism. For me, these just bury the sliver, to fester and the wound to grow. I think I’ll always be prone to melancholy and that’s okay. It’s part of who I am. I don’t want to be cured, and I’m not even quite sure if I want to “heal”. (I’m not sure what that even means.) All life is struggle. I must take the minotaur by the horns and fight him, to the death!”
Cynthia Neville
3 years ago
What a beautifully written piece. I wish you the best. And I look forward to reading your book.
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
I read Clare’s The Light in the Dark at the end of last year. I got a lot out of it, mostly a feeling of wanting to understand better than I had before, especially how to manage when you have children and have to keep going. It was not easy reading, but as it is set up as a diary, it was fairly easy to read small parts every day. It would have been tough to just sit down and read straight through.
Chris Wheatley
3 years ago
So, if you expect everything to be good and it’s not, you get depressed.
If you expect everything to be bad and it’s not, you get happy.
Ah yes right on schedule, here we go yet again with this routine: ‘The mentally ill person whose mental illness nothing but a a quaint ephemeral and picturesque gift of ‘melancholia’ granting the individual vast spiritual insight and considerable social cachet’ -schtick is back, Again!
This is the same trite, glib, shallow, cliched and naive fantasy of “One flew over the cuckoos nest” in which mental illness is a social construct has now returned for what must be the fifth time in as many decades.
“It’s not an illness, man… it’s a BREAKTHROUGH!! He’s not crazy – society is crazy, man! ‘Cause like, If you just, like, talk to them nicely ‘n stuff, man – then all their problems simply vanish, don’t you know?! Stop being so mean by trying to treat them! Maybe they like rotting teeth, hallucinations and shrieking all night behind a garbage bin – until they are finally hospitalized with malnutrition related disease – who are you to impose your establishment hang-ups, man!?”
Here in Vancouver our policy and legislation on mental illness is so utterly misguided that parts of the city resemble an open air insane asylum – dotted with shrieking shouting starving rotten toothed twitching and occasionally violent people who cannot be legally be committed or treated – unless and until they physically injure a passerby- because mental illness is of course nothing more than social construct that vanishes if you just think about it the right way – like this puerile article does.
AN, you are right but you have missed the point of this particular article. You are right in that even a ‘nervous breakdown’ is not as serious in one way as true mental illness. It is easier to treat and easier to heal. Once experienced, few people ever want to end up in that state again. Whereas mental illness! My heart goes out to those sufferers who cannot get proper treatment, who may not be able to decide for themselves even to continue with treatment so they get lost and end up homeless etc etc. We have not served these people well, people who CANNOT without skilled and caring support, get better or even stay on an even keel. But we all of us can do something to support the depressed/melancholic individual whereas without skilled help, mental illness is a disaster for all concerned. Again you are right to be angry about the current obsession with mental health issues in one way as people are depressed in their spirits and emotions and should get better but not ill in the way that a schizophrenic is.
Try and have more compassion and you may think and feel differently. Do you understand the trauma behind people’s mental illnesses ? Walk in their shoes.
I have had a kind of pervasive sadness for decades, not depression, but emotional weariness. I always was extremely oriented to nature and eventually got to know it better than any other thing I know in existance, but getting so deep into it I found the heart of nature is a coldness, an inhuman indifference to any degree or amount of suffering. It just is, and is vast and full of trillions of things beginning life, suffering, and dieing in this mad cyclone: Juggernaut’s Great Wheel. I have seen too much suffering to be unaffected.
I am still in nature ongoing, I cannot bear be away from it, I am on the water almost daily, I fish a great deal, I garden, I am walking in the woods a lot, I live in the woods, with my animals. Still, I love natural life, but I cannot stop seeing the gratuitous utter cold cruelty of the life of the wild creatures, and feel the inhumanity of nature’s complete lack of any compassion, its utter indifference to life that is burgeoning on it. The only things which keeps us all from feeling this is being in society where there is some humanity, some compassion exists, even if we are not receiving any, we know it exists, as it does not in nature.
Arctic explorers almost all mention this sense of depression from raw nature, the tropic explorers do, how it weigs on them. It is an odd dualism, grandness, beauty, and endless suffering in a cosmos of indifference.
And a couple weeks ago my delicate, tiny, loving, pretty, dog died miserably because of just one second, it was with someone else, loaned as company because they were depressed, and it was run over. I have not ever known this deep a depression. I have had other dogs die in their time, but this one was so fragile, I cared so for it, for a decade, it was like a childlike innocent, and then a bad death. This just nailed me. More than I would ever have expected. Just a tiny fox like dog, I am so sad I cannot stop feeling this utter despair for the loss. But I do know time will heal it, not yet, but eventually, I hope.
The person who had it when it died is crushed, and we are going to the shelter and get her a dog, and maybe me another one, I still have one, but maybe a second one again will be good.
I was so sorry to read about your little dog
I’m so sorry to hear about your beloved dog. I thought immediately of the words of Dr Ishaq above – “It’s not about curing, it’s about healing”. Nothing can cure loss or make it right, and I think part of us doesn’t want death fixed as if it had never happened – that can feel like a life erased rather than one prematurely cut short. Healing, though, life going on and loss prompting us and the people who care about us to do better things; I think that counts for everything. It sounds like your little dog had a very rich life, and now another dog will be cherished and nurtured and a friendship strengthened by a refusal to let tragedy define it. Your words prove that there isn’t a cosmos of indifference, but one of love. Take care of yourselves like your little fox-like dog would have done, as you and your friend heal.
I’m really sorry to hear about your dog. You’ll always remember him, but I am sure you will find another lovely companion.
Sanford, I am so sorry to hear about the sudden loss of your sweet pup. Her (?) life was about so much more than the last minute of it. There may be a heaven, and if so, she’s there.
My deepest sympathies. Do not despair. Time will not heal you, but it will weary you a bit less, perhaps.
Oh my, so very sorry Sanford. I do know how you feel and it is very tough to go on. I’ve never really gotten over my own similar situation, it still hurts but what I know is that it’s still better to have them and love them than not to and skip the pain.
Thank you Horatio.
Perhaps this epitaph from Ancient Rome to a beautiful dog called Margarita (Pearl) will cheer both you and Sanford Artzen up? You can find it in the British Mseum.
“Gaul sired me, the shell of the rich sea gave me my name: the honour of that name is becoming to my beauty. Taught to roam unexplored woodlands with courage and to chase furry things over the hills, unaccustomed ever to be restrained by heavy harnesses or to endure savage beatings with my snow-white body: for I used to lie in my master’s and my mistress’s lap and mastered the art of resting wearily on a spread-out blanket. Even though I used to be able to express more than I was entitled to with my near silent mouth- that of a dog! –, no one feared my barking. But I have already met my fate, stricken down during ill-omened whelping – me, whom earth now covers under this little marble plaque”
Margarita .
Meanwhile, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders gets thicker and thicker with every new edition and more and more instances of feeling a bit down for perfectly understandable reasons become medicalised.
In the current lockdown I’m sure there are many people who have experienced the feelings of melancholy as described above, including myself. Living alone, with health issues, in the middle of a bleak winter, unable to meet friends … these all conspired as a quadruple whammy on my psyche. Thankfully we heading towards the end for what has been for me one of the most testing of my life and one I do not want to experience again.
German has an interesting word, “Sehnsucht”…which is translated as “longing”, “yearning” or “nostalgia”. It’s always used with an air of sadness or melancholy because you can’t be with the person/have the thing/be at the place to which the feeling refers. The target of the feeling may or may not be something that existed; a place may be a “Sehnsuchtsort” (Ort = place) even if you haven’t been there. The person experiencing the emotional feels incomplete somehow.
Our English word nostalgia comes from a similar idea in Greek – algia, pain and nostos, returning home – the ache you feel when you yearn to go back to a safer place, but can’t.
When I was a child, I came across a painting by Maxfield Parrish—one of those depicting a Classic garden and gorgeous natural surroundings, at a golden and soaring blue twilight. I was struck so deeply by this—the longing, the joy, the sorrow, the sense that I should BE there.
I was so happy to learn I wasn’t alone in this experience when I read “Surpised by Joy” wherein C.S. Lewis described the exact same sort of feeling; he calls it joy. It’s sehnsucht. It’s hiraeth. It may be a brief glimpse or inner knowledge of Heaven.
Goethe wrote a novel ‘Sorrows of young Werther’ about unrequited love and unfortunately it attracted young men to kill themselves. It is thought it was the beginning of the romantic era where the young were praised for being pale and languid-ennui became a fashionable word amongst the middle classes.The young today seem a bit sad and humour-free. Jane Austen makes fun of it in Persuasion where a young man is grieving for his dead fiancee ,reading sad poems and the like , then promptly ups and marries the first new girl he meets.
I’m German, and what’s interesting about the word Sehnsucht is that it’s a compound. “Sehnen” means longing, yearning. “Sucht” comes from “Siechtum” which means illness, especially long-term incurable illness/ infirmity, and the modern meaning of Sucht is addiction. So, Sehnsucht is an addiction to longing or longing yourself sick. It’s a much stronger feeling than nostalgia, which also exists in German (Nostalgie) and is quite mild by comparison.
Thank you Horatio for this.
A brilliant article, thank you Horatio. Burton attended my grammar school when he was a child and I recall an ancient edition of his book behind a glass case in one of our halls. I haven’t thought about it until I read this, so will look to purchase a copy and read it.
This is utterly beautiful. The nuance you so beautifully express, the ways of seeing, are what is so needed in our world. So much wisdom here.
Please can anyone identify the painting of the lady in the white dress in a walled garden?
I’m 62. About age 50, and 53, I had what I describe as “an emotional earthquake”. At fifty, it was only rumbles, at 53, it was devastating. I didn’t have psychosis, just a long, intense period of what I can only call “melancholy-angst-intermittent-existential-panic”. It was very tenacious and lasted for years. I described it to others as a mid-life crisis, but maybe it was much more than that. It did involve gerascophobia.
At some point I gave up mentioning it, because, even though it’s rooted in concrete experiences and memories, there’s a certain ineffability to it that even the most well-intentioned people couldn’t really understand. I pondered and pondered, reflected and reflected, and searched and searched the Internet. Little my little, clue by clue, I found words, concepts, books, movies, melancholics throughout history, that gradually helped me ease it. As some commenters have already mentioned, “sehnsucht” was one of them. “Weltschmerz” was another. I sought out and read books and watched films and television episodes that allowed me to confront, face and explore my feelings, that contained bits and pieces of them. I guess it may have been a sort of exposure therapy. It allowed me, to some degree, to objectify my feelings in literature, art and film, and to that extent, lessen their grip.
Static, The Twilight Zone
The Guests, The Outer Limits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJs7pZg_ngQ
She
Lost Horizon
You Can’t Go Home Again
Brave New World
The Swimmer
Just to name a few.
I tried to discuss it on a few Internet forums, but I found it pointless and frustrating. Nobody seemed to quite get it, and many nagged me to “get help”, as in psychotherapy. I have serious problems with psychiatry and modern psychology. My melancholy is not “clinical”. I believe these are very much rooted in reductionist, physicalist and secular worldviews, which I don’t share. I see myself as religio-philosophical, and questions of an afterlife and the nature of the self are very deep, mysterious and unanswered for me, and very existentially relevant. Therapists who have atheist or indifferentist-agnostic biases cannot see or feel the big picture that I do, which is very relevant to what questions I must explore and what course I might take. They dismiss them as distractions and try to control the narrative. Therapy/psychiatry/clinical psychology is like modern shamanism. It will work fine for people who’ve internalized the conventional worldview of the society they grew up in. It will not work for the philosopher, the thinker, the doubter.
I’ve had bouts of melancholy as far back as age 14. I’ve also had ecstatic visions of joy, though I think those are pretty much gone now, washed away by time and bitter experience. Now they’re replaced more by hard realism. Right now, I’m working on letting go of many things I’ve clung to for a long time. It’s not easy, and I accept that. I suppose this sounds morose to most people, but actually it’s very therapeutic. A lot of my melancholy has been caused by longing for the unattainable, most recently, the unattainable past. My terrifying, exciting, “barbarian world” as I call it.
I think I’ve made quite a lot of progress on my own, and one thing I’ve avoided is happy, sappy, positivity and optimism. For me, these just bury the sliver, to fester and the wound to grow. I think I’ll always be prone to melancholy and that’s okay. It’s part of who I am. I don’t want to be cured, and I’m not even quite sure if I want to “heal”. (I’m not sure what that even means.) All life is struggle. I must take the minotaur by the horns and fight him, to the death!”
What a beautifully written piece. I wish you the best. And I look forward to reading your book.
I read Clare’s The Light in the Dark at the end of last year. I got a lot out of it, mostly a feeling of wanting to understand better than I had before, especially how to manage when you have children and have to keep going. It was not easy reading, but as it is set up as a diary, it was fairly easy to read small parts every day. It would have been tough to just sit down and read straight through.
So, if you expect everything to be good and it’s not, you get depressed.
If you expect everything to be bad and it’s not, you get happy.
If only it were that simple! The article makes it clear it is not!
That is the Buddhist way..
Ah yes right on schedule, here we go yet again with this routine: ‘The mentally ill person whose mental illness nothing but a a quaint ephemeral and picturesque gift of ‘melancholia’ granting the individual vast spiritual insight and considerable social cachet’ -schtick is back, Again!
This is the same trite, glib, shallow, cliched and naive fantasy of “One flew over the cuckoos nest” in which mental illness is a social construct has now returned for what must be the fifth time in as many decades.
“It’s not an illness, man… it’s a BREAKTHROUGH!! He’s not crazy – society is crazy, man! ‘Cause like, If you just, like, talk to them nicely ‘n stuff, man – then all their problems simply vanish, don’t you know?! Stop being so mean by trying to treat them! Maybe they like rotting teeth, hallucinations and shrieking all night behind a garbage bin – until they are finally hospitalized with malnutrition related disease – who are you to impose your establishment hang-ups, man!?”
Here in Vancouver our policy and legislation on mental illness is so utterly misguided that parts of the city resemble an open air insane asylum – dotted with shrieking shouting starving rotten toothed twitching and occasionally violent people who cannot be legally be committed or treated – unless and until they physically injure a passerby- because mental illness is of course nothing more than social construct that vanishes if you just think about it the right way – like this puerile article does.
AN, you are right but you have missed the point of this particular article. You are right in that even a ‘nervous breakdown’ is not as serious in one way as true mental illness. It is easier to treat and easier to heal. Once experienced, few people ever want to end up in that state again. Whereas mental illness! My heart goes out to those sufferers who cannot get proper treatment, who may not be able to decide for themselves even to continue with treatment so they get lost and end up homeless etc etc. We have not served these people well, people who CANNOT without skilled and caring support, get better or even stay on an even keel. But we all of us can do something to support the depressed/melancholic individual whereas without skilled help, mental illness is a disaster for all concerned. Again you are right to be angry about the current obsession with mental health issues in one way as people are depressed in their spirits and emotions and should get better but not ill in the way that a schizophrenic is.
I don’t think that’s what the article says at all.
Try and have more compassion and you may think and feel differently. Do you understand the trauma behind people’s mental illnesses ? Walk in their shoes.