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A prize-winning poet whose name escapes me was once asked if he had any advice for aspiring young poets. He said they need, “sadness, more personal torment and sadness.”
It is, perhaps, not difficult to see why sadness may be helpful to a poet. It can provide both material for creative work and the energy to bring a project to completion. It provides material, because it alters the way in which we view the world. When we are sad, nothing looks quite as it does on other days; everything becomes suffused with new meaning. Indeed, in sadness, we make the world our own by imbuing it with the qualities of our moods.
But sadness can supply the necessary motivation for creative work as well. It does this by generating a conflict between our psyches and the world, a conflict that we sense intuitively can be mitigated through artistic self-expression.
Not every such tension or conflict will do, of course. Apathy and torment put us at odds with the world as well yet neither is conducive of creation. Sadness is different. It occupies a sweet spot between the piercing pain of agony and the dull aches of boredom and indifference. It is the kind of pain that can be transformed into beauty.
What, though, if you are not a writer or a poet? Can sadness do anything for you then?
Melancholia
There is one kind of sadness, the type I wish to refer to as melancholia, that makes us aware of the irreversible passage of time and the brevity of our own lives. Melancholia is that bittersweet feeling we get when, upon visiting our parental home, we recognize that we will never be children again. It is also the feeling we may get when we contemplate the fact that everything we love and care about will one day disappear, along with us; that our entire civilization will disappear, then our planet, and that in a sense, all of our struggles and strives are storms in a teacup.
Gustave Flaubert, in "Last Weeks in Egypt," describes a different variety of this state — the melancholia we experience when we bid farewell to a place we visited: “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the mélancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”
It may seem surprising that we can enjoy the sadness at the end of a journey, but we do. One does not think of this particular reward upon arrival. Arrival is joyful. It must be. It would be rather peculiar if one embarked on a voyage with the conscious intention of experiencing the sadness at the end of the stay.
Yet, once in that state, we can appreciate its nuance, its sophistication. Our emotional lives would be impoverished without the capacity to plunge into contemplative sadness. The psyche is like a musical instrument that can produce many kinds of emotional states, much the way a piano can produce various types of music. However, unlike a piano whose strings do not lose their capacity to vibrate without a pianist, we need to make our passional strings vibrate if we want to preserve our inner emotional range.
In some way, we are all aware of this, I think, which is why we consume fiction. We read novels and watch films partly so that the emotional strings in our psyches that do not normally get touched by external events in our lives would finally make a sound, touched by the events in the lives of fictional people.
But fiction gives us only vicariously experienced emotional states. We may opt to stick to those because they allow us to exercise our capacities to feel in a safe way. By contrast, we often try to avoid our own, non-vicarious sadness. Yet fiction is not a substitute for living. If we want to explore and preserve the full gamut of sentiments humans are capable of, we must confront the world for ourselves, non-vicariously – we need our own joy but also, our own sadness, and our melancholia.
Healing
Marcel Proust says that we can only be healed of a suffering by experiencing it to the fullest. There is truth to that. There are different ways to deal with suffering. One strategy is distraction. This may be particularly helpful when an affliction has no redeeming qualities; when all it causes us is meaningless pain. But the sadness I have been focusing on here is not like this, or need not be.
Another strategy is medication. That too may be appropriate, particularly when our torment is so acute that life itself becomes a burden, as may happen in the state we call depression. But the pain of sadness is not unbearable. Indeed, varieties of it – for instance, melancholia – can be enjoyed and even relished though never in the way happiness can be enjoyed.
No less importantly, however, we can heal in suffering – we do by examining our pain's roots and reflecting on its stages, and meaning. It may in fact be that the chief function of our ability to feel sad is this potential of sadness to heal us and remove from our psyches the causes of its own existence.
What Homer knew?
Sadness schools the human outlook. It is difficult – and perhaps, impossible – to imagine a truly wise person who avoids sadness at all cost or who does not know it in its richness and depth.
In a discussion of Homer’s Odyssey, Virginia Woolf suggests that the Ancient Greeks had the ability to accept sadness permanently, like a lodger in their hearts who just lives there. They had difficult lives and knew all the ways in which life brings suffering. The people that populate the world of the Odyssey, she says:
are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure…
There is something to be learned from Homer and Woolf. There is wisdom about accepting sadness at the back of life. Perhaps, the Ancient Greeks had no choice. Maybe, their lives were so terrible that the only way to go forward was to become accustomed to pain. But this wisdom, which may have been forced upon them by the ruthlessness of their fates, is still wisdom, and it may carry insights partially lost to us though our lives have their own share of pain.
I do not, by any means, wish to suggest here that we should invite sadness. My point is simply that we need not resist it. And it’s not as though we ought never resist it either. It is not always a good time for sadness much as it is not always an opportune moment to watch a tragedy. What I have been arguing is that sometimes it is. There are days when we can welcome the blues and be better off for it – more creative, more observant, wiser, and in the end, more truly whole.
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