by ADAM ROBERTS
Chatterton by Henry Wallis 1856, Tate Britain. IMAGE/Wikipedia
Iwas listening to Paul Simon’s Hearts and Bones album recently, for the first time in many years – the first time, really, since I was a young teenager. I bought it when it came out in 1983 and listened to it over and over. But hearing it again, and particularly listening to the title track, I was struck by a question: how did I take this back then? What did it mean to me, and why did it mean so much?
So: the title song is a beautifully worn-down response to a relationship at its end, a mix of nostalgic glimpses of happier times and a weary, bruised sense of life in the aftermath of some cathartic break-up. Listening to it as a young teenager, still a virgin and almost wholly inexperienced in such emotions, I wonder if I didn’t think this is how I want to feel. I wanted the happiness, but in a retrospective way (because then it’s done and dusted and safe); and I wanted the melancholy because it just seemed so grown-up and sophisticated and suave. I wanted, as an old joke has it, to skip the marriage and go straight to the divorce. After all – and I am hardly the first person to point this out – there is a complex sort of joy in sadness.
But can this be right? Surely what people want is to be happy. Whole philosophies (I’m looking at you, utilitarianism) rest on the premise that more happiness is always and everywhere a good thing. There is a Global Happiness Index, measuring how happy people are (Denmark tops the league). Bhutan even has a Gross National Happiness Commission, with the power to review government policy decisions and allocate resources.
It’s good to be happy sometimes, of course. Yet the strange truth is that we don’t wish to be happy all the time. If we did, more of us would be happy – it’s not as if we in the affluent West lack tools or means to gratify ourselves. Sometimes we are sad because we have cause, and sometimes we are sad because – consciously or unconsciously – we want to be. Perhaps there’s a sense in which emotional variety is better than monotony, even if the monotone is a happy one. But there’s more to it than that, I think. We value sadness in ways that make happiness look a bit simple-minded.
Sadness inspires great art in a way that grinningly eating ice cream in your underpants cannot. In his essay ‘Atrabilious Reflections upon Melancholy’ (1823), Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor) praised melancholy as a more refined state of mind than happiness. ‘Melancholy can scarce exist in an undegraded spirit – it cannot exist in a mere animal’ is how he put it:
Melancholy is the only Muse. She is Thalia and Melpomene. She inspired Milton and Michael Angelo, and Swift and Hogarth. All men of genius are melancholy – and none more so than those whose genius is comic. Men (those I mean who are not mere animals) may be divided, according to the kind of their melancholy, into three great classes. Those who seek for the infinite, in contradistinction to the finite – those who seek for the infinite in the finite – and those who seek to degrade the finite by a comparison with the infinite. The first class comprehends philosophers and religionists; the second, poets, lovers, conquerors, misers, stockjobbers, & c.; and the third comprises satirists, comedians, jokers of all kinds, man-haters, and womanhaters, Epicures, and bon-vivants in general.
Melancholy, Coleridge is arguing, is more dignified than happiness. I suspect this is a sense that most people have – that joy is, at root, a kind of idiot pleasure, the idiom of the lobotomy, a balloon just waiting to be popped. Sorrow is somehow more grown-up, because less illusioned. It feels more sincere, more authentic. As she prepared to write Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot copied the following from Thomas Carlyle’s Life of Oliver Cromwell into her notebook: ‘The quantity of sorrow he has, does it not mean withal the quantity of sympathy he has, the quantity of faculty and victory he shall yet have? Our sorrow is the inverted image of our nobleness.’
Aeon for more