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Necessary Melancholy?

Not long ago, I read an interesting interview in the Uruguayan press with the Irish writer Mary Kenny. In it, she speaks about reclaiming the right to be sad in a culture that has increasing come to see a person’s lack of happiness in pathological terms.

She is no denier of the reality of clinical depression. Rather, she seeks to recover the ability to, at least in some degree, posit the existence of melancholy within an existential framework, or put more simply, in the context of the fundamental difficulty of life.

Might she be on to something? Have we lost, or are we losing, the ability to frame our struggles in light of the fact that outright bliss and calm have always been fairly scarce goods in human life?

To what extent is consumer culture’s need to sell us solutions for our problems play into a framing of life that posits sadness and struggle as anomalous human conditions?

And finally, to what extent might the insistence on maintaining a positive attitude, and thus expressing our analyses of the world in upbeat practical terms possibly rendering us immobile before true threats to our physical (the destruction of our natural environments) or moral (the mass displacement, torture and killing of people being carried out in our names) existence?

10 November 2010