If Melancholy Would Be So Kind

This is the feeling you want to have when a good song comes on in a restaurant but no one is dancing. The confidence you’d have to get up out of your seat and dance with the person sitting next to you even when no one else is. The thrill you find when talking to a crush, the perfect line or the gaze that says it all. 

We are flying on top of the whole world even if we know a desperate landing is to come.

For now, we soar - we could die tomorrow so tonight we live as it’s our last.

Smile bright and laugh, giggle, dance, love. Life is far too short to ever deny ourselves of this. 

Our whole purpose of existence is to feel the sensation of loving and losing one another.

A pipe dream.

That’s my answer when people ask me how my life is going. Six months ago when I wrote the above excerpt, it felt too true - you can see it. 

It’s a colloquialism often used to share a euphoric or unbelievable event happening in one’s life - a feeling of ecstasy or contentment. The problem with a pipe dream, and the contents in which you achieve the transcendent state, is that you will always want, or need, more. Another hit. Breathing in all the essence of aspiration-filled smoke and exhaling any sense of consequential reality.

My fingers burned as I lit my pipe then, and now I face the dim, brooding flame, like the stormy clouds that batter the Irish skies above—heavens eager to wage war on the happiness the sun offers. Like an addict, I’d do anything for another hit of the places that brought me here.

And so I am altogether under the weather. Feeling stranded on my own island. Ironic. 

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I started writing this blog to tell stories of the people I met in my days, hoping that it would memorialize my adventures and make the world’s hearts beat a little louder in my ears. But I also hoped it would encourage people. The idea that ‘no man is an island’ is because even in loneliness we may look around and see that life is still turning and people are still living. It’s okay to feel alone and equally know that it is not true.

 I often wonder if melancholia is truly wasted on the youth. Mostly gone are the days of creating the most beautiful, vile, raw, and intricate art out of feelings of emptiness, despair, or heartbreak. Instead, we rationalize our grief and bleakness away when perhaps more than ever, we should let it harden the scales of our skin—an armor to carry us through the days we have yet to live - and let what we produce tell the tale.

Susan Sontag’s An Argument on Beauty reflects on the evolved perspective of ‘beauty’. Beauty, once a formal and revered concept, has become more informal and abstract, often replaced by the idea of "interest”. Beauty now requires a level of intelligence to classify the understanding of a beauty like Les Miserables, or Bouguereau’s Equality Before Death, or a great love.

“Imagine saying, “The sunset is interesting”.”

A German soldier stands guard under the frigid Russian sky in 1942 and writes,

“The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by the intense experience.”

Intelligence cannot capture the words trapped within the soul; only the rash and explicit movements of art and writing, out of our deepest emotions, can loosely explain to us what is incomprehensible. 

Beauty and art are part of the global balm used to console and idealize. “Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.”

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I do think the absence of my writing - published and personal - is because I have been mourning the loss of what was beautiful in the past, and, in the present, it has been difficult to see anything with clarity. To teach myself to be ‘overwhelmed’ by the beauty implies a liberation from the search and an invitation to take all at face value. The good, the bad, and the horrendous - with no sense of justification or secrecy. A means to write things that maybe people will understand or only the recesses of the desk drawer will see but nonetheless it will be authentic. A testament to feeling alive.