In Praise of Melancholy

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October 3, 2012

a project of ServiceSpace

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

- Kahlil Gibran -

In Praise of Melancholy

"Eighty-four percent of Americans claim to be happy, a statistic that Wake Forest University English professor Eric G. Wilson finds "strange at best, troubling at worst." With a litany of self-help books, pills and plastic surgery to feed an addiction to happiness, he says, "It's now easier than ever before to live a trouble-free life, to smooth out the rough edges, to hide the darkness." In his recent book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson --a non-recovering melancholic by choice --praises sorrow as the muse of many writers and songwriters, warning that to rid life of it is to rid life of a vital source of creativity." { read more }