This is an essay about melancholy. It shows significant maturation and depth in Montaigne’s project that he’s now capable of handling the subject directly. In his early essays, he denied feeling it and stigmatized those who expressed feelings about it.
In examining this issue, it’s important to distinguish melancholy from depression. Depression is a medical condition of persistent sadness over a lengthy period. Melancholy is a mood, one that comes and goes, but is often a state that comes up often for those touched by it. The fact that it does not overwhelm one’s life and make it impossible to function makes it different than depression and permits me to say that I consider melancholia to be my friend. But I’ll return to that shortly.
Montaigne begins by noting that even in sexual pleasure, there’s something within it that’s physically painful and subject to mental lament:
The greatest of our pleasures has an air of groaning and lamentation. Could you not say that it was languishing from affliction? Indeed when we forge images of it at its highest reach we paint its face with sickly epithets and dolorous qualities: languor, faintness, weakness, debility, morbidezza, which greatly witnesses to their common blood and consubstantiality. Deep joy has more gravity than gaiety; the highest and fullest happiness, more calm than playfulness.
He then quotes Seneca saying that even joy overwhelms us, unless it be tempered. He continues:
Ease crushes us. That is what is meant by that line of ancient Greek poetry: ‘The gods sell us all the pleasures which they give us’; that is to say, none that they give us is pure and perfect: we can only buy them at the price of some suffering. Pleasure and travail, so unlike in their natures, are yet fellows by some inexplicable natural relationship. Socrates said that some god or other made an assay at fusing pain and pleasure into one mass: when he could not achieve this he decided at least to couple them by their tails.
I gather from this introduction that Montaigne had a bittersweet sex life, which might have made for more interesting story telling than his weird collection of too personal descriptions of physical sensations he relates to sex in other essays.
He then turns the discussion around and notes that there’s an odd sort of pleasure in sadness. Here’s how Montaigne describes it:
Metrodorus said that sadness was not unalloyed with a certain pleasure. I do not know whether he meant something else: personally I can readily think that there is an element of purpose, consent and complacency in feeding oneself on melancholy – I mean, quite apart from ambition, which can also be mixed up with it. There is some hint as of delicate sweetmeats which smiles at us and flatters us in the very bosom of melancholy. Are there not some complexions which make it their only food?
I see it slightly differently. I think the kind of sadness I experience often signals a recently lost or impending happiness. There is not pleasure in the sadness itself, but in the good thing that is being mourned. It’s the idea expressed in the Adrian Lenker song “Sadness as a Gift.” This I see as one of the positive aspects of melancholy, a reason why I do not believe it deserves to be hidden away, it is often a signal pointing towards joy. It is also an opportunity to go deeper into parts of life that those without melancholia are sometimes blind to.
Montaigne approaches this point by shifting to the bittersweet:
Nature reveals this alloy to us; painters hold that the same wrinkling movements of our faces which serve to show weeping also show laughter. Indeed. Watch the picture in progress before either emotion has been finally delineated: you are in doubt towards which it is tending. And the extremes of laughter are mixed with tears.
But what of melancholy’s clinical cousin, depression. I’ve heard three useful descriptions of depression. One is that while anxiety is always facing the future, depression looks backwards. It makes you start questioning choices and how time has been spent and whether the investments you’ve made in others has been in error. The second definition, that I mentioned in On Anger, is that depression is anger turned inward. If you cut off anger before it exhausts itself and internalize the feelings, it tends to build up into an energy sapping force.
The third definition of depression is that it’s the result of self attack. So if you start looking back, pull in that anger and tell yourself how stupid you were to put your attention someplace, you invite depression through the door. Reframing these thoughts in a more self-loving way can lead to insight without darkness. But I also have to admit that, some days, I just don’t have the energy to reframe my mind and the melancholy creeps in. In those cases, the important thing to consider is that this is a passing mood, do not refer to yourself as depressed. Perhaps we need a strategy to avoid the latter, but sadness is an inevitable part of life and denying it is no help.
Montaigne spoke earlier of how we are all comprised of bits and pieces that align in different ways. Just how many of those bits and pieces that there are in each of us varies, as do the ways they can align. I’m such a consummate people watcher and analyzer of personalities that I can’t help myself from being drawn to some of the most puzzling.
Here Montaigne uses an analogy similar to the jigsaw analogy, in a line that inspired some dialogue in Hamlet:
Man, totally and throughout, is but patches and many-coloured oddments.
Montaigne seems to have a bias toward people who withholds rather than those who examine deeply and hunger for contradictions. Note that what follows is a rich thing for Montaigne to say, since it describes his project completely:
There is no need to cast light so deeply and keenly on to our affairs. You lose yourself in them by contemplating so much varied brilliance and such diverse forms: ‘Voluntantibus res inter se pugnantes obtorpuerant animi.’ [Minds wallowing in mutual contradictions are benumbed. (Livy)]
But then Montaigne closes with a thought that is more in line with how he really behaves—and given my often stated preference for making decisions without becoming weighted down by them, I agree with it as well:
He who seeks out all the circumstances and grasps their consequences impedes his choice. A modest talent suffices and can equally well carry into execution matters of great and little weight. Note how those who best manage their estates are the least able to explain how they do so, while the most skillful talkers are as often as not useless at it. I know one man who is excellent at talking about all kinds of estate-management and at describing it but who has let a hundred thousand pounds of income slip through his fingers. I know another who speaks and deliberates better than any man in his council-chamber; never in the world was there a more beautiful display of intelligence and of competence: yet when it comes to practice his servants find he is quite other than that – I mean, even leaving aside bad luck.
Leave a Reply