Against Happiness: Why Can't Grownups Be Emo?

Remember how "depression" used to be called "melancholy"? Well, Eric G. Wilson just wrote a book called Against Happiness that aims to return "melancholia" to the public lexicon, and basically bring back sadness and its "integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos." It is sort of like anti-self-help. Oooh, new genre title: "self-pity"? "self-flagellate"? Neither really do it justice. Anyway, the key is saying "fuck you" to happiness. Joy is okay, but like with carbs on the South Beach it's got to be the right kind of joy, such as: "that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering" or "that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world's sorrows." Meanwhile, you must throw out your self-help books and seratonics and commence basking, dwelling and reveling in the cruel radiance of whatever. Here's how he explains the difference between what he advocates and clinical depression:

Don't think you can really get one without the other? I'll show you something:
Ohhhh kay. It was really difficult to decide which paragraph to quote, because it's pretty much 8000 straight words of this. But my thinking is that a depressive person could be made happier, upon Wilson's book, to think that what she had was "depression" and not this man's melancholia thing. Because even if someone with depression mustered the self-esteem to write something so florid and circular and beautifully, naively, passionately sincere, she would wake up the next morning, scan the open file and see the section where she inadvertently plagiarized the Flaming Lips, and knock her head against the wall before dragging it all to the trash and emptying.

And calling a shrink. And maybe getting a job in marketing.

The Secret To Happiness: It's In Iceland
In Praise Of Melancholia [ChronicleReview]