The importance of melancholy, don't waste it

If you have even just a tendency towards melancholy and this worries you, you could reassure yourself in a few seconds with the words of Victor Hugo: "Melancholy is the happiness of being sad». It seems like an oxymoron, a contradiction that does not stand up to the empirical test of everyday life, but in reality this is exactly what happens with melancholy, if we know how to orient it, govern it. Guide it with the compass of a gaze projected forward and not turned backwards.

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The importance of melancholy

We struggle to imagine people who don't have moments of melancholy. And we don't envy them. They waste a genuine, strong emotion, and probably avoid it, perhaps unconsciously, to stay in the moment. labyrinth of a life very simple in its superficialityYes, melancholy is a complex feeling, one that can't be grasped entirely at once. It requires nuance, it raises questions, it forces us to question ourselves.

Benefits

It is through the melancholy of passing time, for example, that we can push ourselves to the edge with questions of meaningWhere do I come from and where am I going? How much have I given and received in life? Have I lived up to my talents? In this sense, melancholy is a snapshot that can appear and disappear in the temporal space of a flash. But it is a flash that takes us far away. For example, and here melancholy becomes a wound, towards nostalgic mourning, what we would have liked to do (or be) and were unable to achieve. Melancholy has no ageIt's not at all a feeling for older or more mature people. On the contrary, it often comes with adolescence, with youth, with that surge of vital energy that carries us toward full maturity, with the end of so many carefree illusions and with the increase in responsibilities of various kinds.

Effects

Melancholy it is made of places and smellsEach of us has had a place where we felt happiest, most peaceful: just return there and you'll feel the breeze of melancholy creep over your skin. That place, in its silence, will always tell you something. Like a perfume, which you immediately connect to a person, a circumstance. And it is then that you will better discover what Hugo He defined it as "the happiness of being sad." Alongside transitory melancholy, tied to a particular period of life, a phase, or a specific age, there is character-specific melancholy. Permanent. To the point of becoming a somatic aspect of the person: you can see melancholic people from a look, from the way they place their fingers on their face, or from the way they move their hands. Already Hippocrates he considered melancholy one of the four humors (the black humor) that constitute the nature of the human body, and all psychoanalysis, from Freud From then on, he did nothing but delve into this feeling so intertwined with the person. In search of what separates melancholy from depression, that extra step that the naturally melancholic person always risks taking.

Don't waste the melancholy

For those who feel this danger—and we don't say this for comfort—we suggest a dive into literature, poetry, and art. You'll discover the universe of geniuses inspired by the power of melancholy, and you'll savor the results. Michelangelo he hoped to "remain locked up, to the marrow, in melancholy." Tolstoy It was the wish of wishes. Upon his arrival, in the words of Ungaretti, «leans against the balustrade of the breeze». And if Dante hoped to be in his company, for Baudelaire melancholy was "always inseparable from the feeling of beauty."

Melancholy: the happiness of being sad