On Melancholy

Sitting here in my room alone on a Saturday night. This is a familiar feeling. Melancholy. I had the opportunity to go out to a club with friends but I guess I just didn't feel up to it. I needed some space to sort through my thoughts.

If there's any central theme that grips my life, I would say it is melancholy. The emotion of melancholy, to me, is a dichotomous one. The feeling of sadness is balanced against an acutely heightened appreciation of transience. My happiness always seems to be tinged with the knowledge that it is fleeting. There is a beauty in that, but also a tremendous despair. I live with the awareness that everything I have, everyone I know, will someday become dust and ashes, just like me. This makes the beautiful moments in life truly special, because I know they will never be grasped again.

In some ways it is a problematic ideology. Instead of being able to appreciate the good times and endure the bad, it completely transcends that framework and makes the dominant theme in life either that of loss, or anticipating loss. Maybe I would be a much happier person if I were able to restructure this framework, but it would feel disingenuous. For all I know, tomorrow is my last day on this incredible Earth. The threat of loss provides meaning: I cannot know what lies ahead, only that I am living now and am presented with the choice to use this moment well, or waste it. Knowing that all I truly have is the precious moment in front of me galvanizes my passion to live.

As a caveat, I have always taken issue with the phrase "Live every day like it's your last." I never really understood what that meant. Certainly I would not be committed to the 7-10 year commitment of studying medicine if I knew I would die tomorrow. In fact, there would be many things I would change. I would not be nearly as concerned with food, water, money, superficial conversations, and a host of other things. The ludicrousness of this situation suggests that we as a society often think about the future and the past in utterly flawed ways. This however breaches into an entirely different subject (time, and whether it exists or not), which will be the subject for another entry.

I am not sure why I am preoccupied with melancholy and transience. If you had a conversation with me, you would form quite the opposite impression. I am usually an effusively happy and outgoing person. However, when I am in the right company, my brooding, darker, more contemplative personality comes out. I think this was an issue in my relationship. My ex-fiancee was never truly able to understand that part of me and how it affected my outlook on life, how it made me both sad and also inspired. Maybe I am an overly complicated person to understand, because this has definitely gotten in the way of quite a few friendships as well. I am overall a fairly happy person, and I want happiness from life. More than anything though, I want life to have meaning. And keeping melancholy as a part of my personality, even if it is often hidden deep inside me, is an ineffably important part of that.

Among my favorite pieces of literature is the Tzurezuregusa written by a Japanese monk named Kenkō in the 14th century. Transience and melancholy are major considerations in his essays. Here is an excerpt:

   Nothing is sadder than the time after a death.... As long as people remember the deceased person and miss him, all is still well, but before long those people too disappear, and the descendants, who know the man only from reports, are hardly likely to feel deep emotion. Once the services honoring the dead man cease, nobody knows who he was or even his name. Only the sight of the spring weeds sprouting each year by his grave will stir the emotions of sensitive people; but in the end, even the pine tree that groaned in the storm winds is broken into firewood before it reaches its allotted thousand years, and the old grave is plowed up and turned into rice land. How sad it is that even this last memento of the dead should vanish.