Читать книгу The Female Leader - Sonja Becker - Страница 33

B

ut like most people, we often renounce what we would really like to have. The “I want that”

of our childhood is forced out of us, though it would make decisions for example much easier.

If you can’t recognize your fundamental impulses, you can’t join the game. But it would be tedious if you attempted to fight against these human impulses.

Instead try to get them under control. Ambition is the impulse that determines the size of your goal. False humility restrains this ambition. If you duck out of the way of these challenges you will notice how the senses become dulled and you fall into a peculiar form of lethargy – the melancholy that arises when you regret in your inmost being not having tackled a goal, and you mooch around more or less aimlessly because of it.

It looks something like this. After getting up you don’t know what to do. But you get by. Every distraction, even including breakfast television, comes to the fore. You arrange to have breakfast with like-minded friends in order to talk yourself into the vale of tears. It is not long in the conversation before there is no way out of it. Then, first a prosecco to it. A small one. Thus weakened, and also to avoid being reminded of past glorious times, you lie down briefly after lunch for starters. In the end it was three “small” proseccos.

Afterwards you drag yourself over to the computer to check your email. And even if the guy you met recently has sent you an enthusiastic email you will never be satisfied with your mail. If anything, you are an email junkie. In the evening a couple of great ideas, especially ones which make sense of your life, occur to you. You make some notes and already your energy has gone. Your energy only stemmed from the guilty feeling that you haven’t done anything else sensible all day in the first place. But the first beer of the evening tastes great again. You meet up with your peers again, because you can be sure that with they will go along with anything you say. What a taxing, tiring day! Although you haven’t done anything. In his thesis on “Melancholia and Society”, Wolf Lepenies describes the phenomenon of melancholia as coming not from inside but out: forms of melancholia, such as lovesickness or other mental symptoms which were treated (mostly by blood-letting) up to the nineteenth century, are indicators of a society which has outlived its time, with failed revolutionaries, bankrupt noblemen and others who lounged about uselessly in the salons of the late nineteenth century without really having anything to do. For they had literally given up their job - or it had been taken from them.

In the modern sense this type of melancholia is of a different nature: an event in your life that continues to have an effect on you such as a separation or a divorce and makes you feel that you have been badly or unjustly treated by someone or, worse, by a man. This feeling dominates you and robs you of the power of looking ahead. You have to get out of this dark corner of the soporific salon.