Sadness & Melancholy

To build one’s house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.

1. Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed With Yellow Of The Sand
2. I Used To Wonder At The Halo Of Light Around My Shadow And Would Fancy Myself One Of The Elect
3. Fearing That They Would Be Light-headed For Want Of Food And Also Sleep
4. Stirring Them Up As The Keeper Of A Menagerie His Wild Beasts
5. The Finest Qualities Of Our Nature Like The Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved
6. Perhaps The Wildest Sound That Is Ever Heard Here Making The Woods Ring Far And Wide
7. I Love To Be Alone
8. A Young Forest Growing Up Under Your Meadows
9. Their Roots Reaching Quite Under The House
10. The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When The Shutter Is Wholly Removed
11. After Soaking Two Years And Then Lying High Six Months It Was Perfectly Sound Though Waterlogged Past Drying
12. The Sun Is But A Morning Star
13. A Low And Distant Sound Gradually Swelling And Increasing
14. As If It Would Have A Universal And Memorable Ending
15. A Sullen Rush And Roar

The tower is just a common grater. It is not used to look out toward a distant world from above, but only to slice, grind and grate its surroundings.

Anyone who stepped inside would see an irremediably cold, metallic, empty void, and a few scattered holes where the world literally seeps through in pieces. It is a sad project.

“We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…”

We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.

Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.

This was never any place I was meant to be.

Watching Alice talk, light a candle that had blown out, rush into the kitchen with the plates, or brush a strand of blonde hair from her face, I found myself falling victim to romantic nostalgia, which descends whenever we are faced with those who might have been our lovers, but whom chance has decreed we will never properly know. The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.

Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again.

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance.
Just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance,
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I’ll never forget the grim look on his face
when he hoisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word…
UNLESS.

They mourn, but smile at length; and, smiling, mourn:
The tree will wither long before it fall:
The hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn;
The roof-tree sinks, but moulders on the hall
In massy hoariness; the ruined wall
Stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone;
The bars survive the captive they enthral;
The day drags through though storms keep out the sun;
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:

Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colors before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings.

He feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

You are so handsome and you look so happy. But deep inside your eyes there is no gaiety, there is only sorrow, as though your eyes knew that happiness did not exist and that all that is beautiful and lovely does not stay with us long.

She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that.

But I know as well as anyone that these are empty dreams, and that having come this far, we cannot turn back.

A mountain village
Where there is not even hope
Of a visitor:
If not for the loneliness,
How painful life here would be.

— Saigyo (Donald Keene translation)

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

The quality which has no name includes these simpler, sweeter qualities. But it is so ordinary as well, that it somehow reminds us of the passing of our own life.

It is a slightly bitter quality.

The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death.

When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.

I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.

For all his unresponsiveness to others’ affection, I now see, it was not them he despised but himself.

After a while, if you don’t leave, then everything else begins to leave.

“Just be yourself, mate! Be yourself in a relationship.”

…What if they don’t like you, man?

What if every relationship you’ve ever been in is just somebody slowly figuring out they didn’t like you as much as they hoped they would?

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.