Varieties of Melancholy: A hopeful guide to our somber moods

by The School of Life, Alain de Botton (Editor)

Overview

This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression, rage, or bitterness, it’s a serene, wise, and kindly response to the difficulties of being alive. It steers a mid-way course between despair on the one hand and naïve optimism on the other. But melancholy is a well-kept secret. Those who feel the pull of melancholy moods tend to stay quiet. We don’t often hear melancholy being celebrated or accorded the respect that it deserves. It languishes unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age. This book carefully collects and interprets a selection of the most universally recognizable melancholy states of mind, rendering us less confused by our precious yet elusive feelings. We discover the melancholy of Sunday evenings and the melancholy of adolescence, the melancholy of parties and the melancholy of crushes. Offering a varied portrait of melancholy and its range of emotions, Varieties of Melancholy leads the reader to both insight, acceptance, and self-compassion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912891948
Publisher:	The School of Life
Publication date:	08/26/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment. The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions.

The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 6 million YouTube subscribers, 351,000 Facebook followers, 218,000 Instagram followers and 163,000 Twitter followers.

The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.

Read an Excerpt

Achievement&Melancholy

For most of our lives, we’re hard at work. We’re up till midnight in the library studying for a degree, we’re learning a trade, building a business, writing a book. We have hardly a moment to ourselves. We don’t even ask whether we are fulfilled; it’s simply obvious that this is the bit that has to hurt. We fall asleep counting the weeks until we are finished with our work.
And then, finally, one day, slightly unexpectedly, the end arrives. Through slow and steady toil, we have achieved what we had been seeking for years: the book is done, the business is sold, the degree certificate is on the wall. People around us cheer and lay on a party; we might even take a holiday.
That is when, for those of us in the melancholy camp, unease is liable to descend. The beach is beautiful, the sky is flawless, there is a scent of lemon in the air from the orchard. We have nothing unpleasant to do. We can read, loll, play and dawdle. Why then are we so flat, disoriented and perhaps slightly tearful?
The mind works in deceptive ways. In order to generate the momentum required to prompt us to finish any task, our mind pretends that once the work is done, it will finally be content, and will accept reality as it is. It will cease its restless questions;it won’t throw up random unease. It will be on our side.
However, our mind isn’t in any way well suited to honouring such promises. It turns out to be vehemently opposed to, and endangered by, states of calm and relaxation. It can manage them, at best, for a day or so. And then, with cold rigour, it will be on its way again with worries and questions. It will ask us once more to account for ourselves, to ask what the point of us is, to doubt whether we are worthy or decent, to question what right we have to be.
Once hard work ends, there is nothing to stop our melancholy minds from leading us to the edge of an abyss we had been able to resist so long as our heads were down. We start to feel that no achievement will ever, in fact, be enough, that nothing we do can last or make a difference, that little is as good as it should be, that we are tainted by a basic guilt of being alive, that others around us are far more noble and able than we will ever be, that the blue sky is oppressive and frightening in its innocence – and that ‘doing nothing’ is the hardest thing we ever have to do.
Perhaps, deep down, the melancholy mind knows that the ultimate fate of the planet is to be absorbed by the Sun in 5 billion years and that everything is therefore vain, considered against a cosmological sense of time and space. We know that we are puny and irrelevant apparitions; we haven’t been so much busy as protected from despair by deadlines, punishing schedules, work trips and late-night conference calls. A grossly inflated local sense of importance spared us a recognition of cosmic futility. But now, with the achievement secured, there is no defence left against existential terror. It is just us and, in the firmament above, the light of a billion billion dying stars. There are no more 8:30 a.m. meetings, no more revision notes and no more chapter deadlines to distract us from our metaphysical irrelevance.
We should be kinder to ourselves. Rather than putting ourselves through the infinitely demanding process of idling (as though a nervous, adrenaline-filled creature such as Homo sapiens could ever pull off such an implausible feat), we should be selfcompassionate enough to keep setting ourselves one slightly irrelevant but well-camouflaged challenge after another – and do our very best to pretend that these matter inordinately and that there should be no sizeable gaps between them.
Our work exists to protect us from a brutal sense of despair and angst. We should ensure that we never stop having tasks to do – and never make that most reckless of moves, taking a long holiday, or – god forbid – embark on a truly foolhardy scheme, retiring.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Intelligence&Melancholy

Pills&Melancholy

Loneliness&Melancholy

Achievement&Melancholy

Superfluity&Melancholy

Photos&Melancholy

The Womb&Melancholy

Astronomy&Melancholy

Landscape&Melancholy

Introversion&Melancholy

Sex&Melancholy

Post-Coitus&Melancholy

History&Melancholy

Righteousness&Melancholy

Crushes&Melancholy

Parties&Melancholy

Splitting&Melancholy

Post-Religion&Melancholy

Sonnet 29&Melancholy

Architecture&Melancholy

Adolescence&Melancholy

Fifty&Melancholy

Luxury&Melancholy

Sunday Evening&Melancholy

Agnes Martin&Melancholy

Hokusai&Melancholy

Travel&Melancholy

Misanthropy&Melancholy

Extinction&Melancholy

America&Melancholy

Animals&Melancholy

Tahiti&Melancholy

Politics&Melancholy

The Inner Critic&Melancholy

Gardening&Melancholy

Editorial Reviews

*** What readers are saying: ***

"A insightful guide into the melancholic state of mind. It details the various types of melancholy as well as the different states of mind. It was such an interesting read and look into melancholy. Filled with artwork, photos, and explanations, and just a really great consoling guide." – NetGalley review

"Finally! An incredibly well written book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy." – NetGalley review

"An amazing self help book ... if you are not a melancholic in nature you will still connect to the book as at some point of time in your life you have felt the emotions of melancholy." – NetGalley review

From the Publisher