However, our culture tends to view everyone from a binary lens: you’re gay or straight, black or white, suicidal or happy. But not everyone is suicidal OR happy. Recently my best friend’s younger sister, Maurine felt blue one day at school, and went to talk to her counselor. When she mentioned that at some point the thought of suicide had crossed her mind, the counselor called an ambulance. They strapped her in and drove her to a mental hospital where they kept her for three days. Maurine, merely felt sad that day, yet she spent her weekend with schizophrenics who heard voices in their head, and people with multiple personalities: people with severe mental disorders. When Maurine finally came home from the mental hospital, she deeply regretted talking to the counselor, and felt traumatized by the experience. Rather than scaring the poor girl, the counselor should have continued to listen to her. All she wanted was a person to share her emotions with; a person to tell her that it’s okay to feel blue on occasion. Given the virtues of melancholy, why do psychiatrists try to “cure” depression as if it were cancer? Obviously, those suffering severe depression require serious medications. But what of the millions who possess mild to moderate depression? Should these potential visionaries be asked to eradicate their melancholia with the help of a pill? Should these possible innovators relinquish what might be their greatest muse (Wilson)?
With the advent of newer and stronger antidepressants, Melancholics are becoming an endangered species. But we need them. Without them we would all live in a world of complacent and content people—no one to challenge the status quo. There would be no revolutionary thinkers. We would live in a black and white sitcom from the fifties like “I Love Lucy” or “Leave it to Beaver”, only with more sex, drugs and rock’n’ roll. Why do we try so hard to avoid the state of melancholy? The answer is simple: Americans don’t like to think. Americans like to DO. We live in an action based culture. To be rewarded, we have to act, therefore we are programmed for efficiency, and thinking—meditating, reflecting, ruminating on the complex beauties of life doesn’t pay. Think about that. In school, do we learn about any American philosophers? No, we don’t. At a college class I took last summer we read exactly one American philosopher, William James. Ironically, he was the father of Pragmatism, a school of thought that defines truth and reality by its realistic effect. Where the ancient Greeks argued that this desk is a copy of the form DESK, and German philosophers might argue that the desk isn’t there, the American philosopher, in his typical American way declared arguing about the “reality” of the desk was a waste of time. Instead, he said we should define the desk by its function. With his bold definition of truth, he became the first and possibly last American philosopher important enough to be included in the list of philosophers taught in introductory philosophy classes. Compare America’s ONE big philosopher with the hundreds of European philosophers. Thinking about life, the universe and everything just isn’t America’s favorite pastime. We’d rather play baseball. And while we watch the world series, or our sitcoms, or our reality shows like American Gladiator, people in France watch philosophers debate about knowledge and reality. Talk about vast cultural differences. But hey, that’s why we hate the French, right? They think too much. So rather than contemplate the world around us in a search for beauty, we focus on our actions and pop a few pills so we can frolic merrily to and from work or school with smiles painted on our faces. It’s understandable why one would want to avoid the anxiety of facing the world’s complexities, all our lives we’re told it’s bad. But this melancholic anxiety, in the end is an exhilarating call to be creative. It’s horrifying at first, like when you’re about to go on the biggest roller coaster ride at an amusement park for the first time, but once you take the leap to open your mind, the possibilities are endless. Yet we often give up our creative potential, the voice of our innermost desires, for a good night’s sleep.
America, as a nation, needs to accept that gloom is inevitable as breath. We must further accept that we’re forever incomplete. We are fragments of some intangible whole (Wilson). It is the most patriotic gesture we could possibly make with our lives. We need to re-embrace the American Transcendentalist culture that first came to be in our new born country, a culture we have long forgotten and replaced. It is the American culture of inquiry and wonder. That culture of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau; A culture that, instead of letting us all become numb, happy clones, encouraged us to embrace our inner darkness; A culture that taught us to observe and explore the beauty of nature and become one with the sublime; A culture that sees, in spite of all the war, hunger and pain in the world, unchanging beauty in the subtleties of nature---whether it is the beauty of a colorful sunset, or the innocent joy of a playful puppy, the distant snow capped mountains, or the cacophony of songbirds at a park. Thoreau once said, “we are enabled to apprehend what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching in reality which surrounds us.” (Thoreau 1132) To embrace melancholy, is to open your ears to hear the true voice of your heart, and to open your mind to the endless paths to true elation, ecstasy and freedom.
