#The melancholy of all things done full#
#The melancholy of all things done plus#

Do we really know how they felt? Was the bon vivant and bachelor David Hume a melancholic? How about Stendhal, who loved life, but wrote works of stunning interiority? Let me throw out a few names offhand: Proust, Wittgenstein, Melville, Gauguin, Schoenberg… are they all melancholics?įoldenyi singles out Caspar David Friedrich for particular treatment as a melancholic. ”Īttributing melancholia to great artists feels like a dangerous game. “ The greater the technical perfection of art, the more prominent the sadness… A creative artist feels perpetual dissatisfaction-however great the work that is brought into being, there is a feeling that he was unable fully to cast it into the form that he conceived in himself-and the viewers, if they lose themselves in the work, find themselves face-to-face with infinite sorrow (as in Don Quixote, for instance) or is the endpoint toward which everything heads (the movingly resigned final scene of War and Peace is like that). Foldenyi shares his thoughts on a few artists whom he is certain are melancholic, like Dürer and Michelangelo.įoldenyi asserts that all great art is sad art. ” (107)Īs with autism, melancholia in the famous is fun to diagnose at literary distance. But being Saturn’s children, they are also clever, outstanding, magnificent, and wise-the same world asserts those things, too, for after all a melancholic can discover shades and perspectives of existence that remain invisible to an ordinary person. They are Saturn’s children, and for that reason stupid, stuck in the mud, and dull-witted-that, at least, is how the world in general thinks of them, since melancholics are incapable of seeing the simplest of facts ‘normally,’ in conformity with public opinion. They build themselves a new world into which they alone can enter… “ Melancholics live in the same world as other people, yet they do not see the same world. “ The example of melancholics shows that they turn away from the world, and all the fixed achievements of civilization become questionable for them, while their indisputable capacities for learning and astuteness make them solitary and withdrawn. Melancholia is resignation: “ Melancholics can never be accused of being revolutionary. They regarded themselves, however, as the most normal of all.

“ They clashed with everything… and that was why they were regarded as abnormal, because others generally satisfied common expectations. Their strength is infinite, because they have gained knowledge of the end, but they are also unhappy, since having experienced the ephemeral nature of humans, they have lost their trust in existence. That makes them strong and outstanding, but also exceedingly frail. The universe is damaged in their person hence, melancholics’ sense of being among the elect, but also their self-hatred to the point of self-annihilation. That explains their unappeasable sense of absence: since they have left the world of moderation, overflowing is inconceivable without being emptied.

#The melancholy of all things done full#

“ Melancholics are prominent precisely because they are too full of life because of them, existence overflows itself. Here is an early claim, coming at the end of the first chapter: Throughout are some gorgeous descriptions of sadness, recklessness, solitude, and suffering.įoldenyi writes with far too much delight on the grandeur of melancholy. While reading the book, I kept wanting to look up the paintings Foldenyi describes or to put it down and pick up something by Thomas Mann at one point I tried to find a good biography of Goethe. (The project of the book is to define the term without bluntness.) It’s not mere depression Foldenyi quotes a writer who regrets that particular term, “a noun with a bland tonality and lacking in any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline.” (253) There’s a much greater weltschmerz implied by the condition, and Foldenyi showcases the special despairs that grip those whom he calls melancholics.

#The melancholy of all things done plus#

What is melancholy? If one has to define it bluntly, one might call it deep thinking plus sadness. The ideas are too provocative and many to excerpt, but still I’ll share a few of the themes below, along with some of my commentary. The book’s main question is one from Aristotle: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?” There’s a startling, beautiful claim on every page. Instead, Melancholy presents depictions of the condition in mythical, novelistic, ecclesiastical, and historical terms. It’s not a self-help book for the melancholic it’s not a social science book on their tendencies and accomplishments it’s not a psychological plumbing of a few famous people whom it afflicts. Laszlo Foldenyi, a Hungarian professor of art, has written a literary history of melancholy.