 A man of constant sorrow? |
It was said of A. Lincoln (as he liked to sign his name) that “his melancholia dripped from him as he walked.” Of the sixty-five or so known pictures of our sixteenth president, that melancholia is readily visible in his deepset eyes and heavily lined mouth; a man of many burdens he was, a man of much regret and loss.
In Lincoln’s Melancholy, Joshua Wolf Shenk recalls an encounter between the president and a visitor to the White House: “You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer, and don’t know a cloud from a star. I am of another temperament.” Such a statement (valid from both an historical and common sense standpoint), hints at the long-debated link between melancholia and great intellectual and creative insight; writers and other artists are sometimes said to be predisposed to melancholia, or more bluntly in the vernacular of today’s psychiatry-laced culture, depression. |
And I…I should know as well as anyone, I suppose. I am a thoughtful person, quiet, introspective, forever memorializing the idyllic past for the sake of a few artfully constructed sentences or a halfway original insight into that special state of being we first learned of in college, the “human condition.”
I am also a depressed person, a condition which, in my case, doesn’t seem to respond to medication or shallow, misguided, misdirected advice to “toughen up” and “get it together.” At the risk of visibly grasping for excuses for my personal failures, my depression at one point or another has derailed or delayed my literary ambitions, my relationships, my career, my life itself. I keep thinking of the old adages which we console ourselves with as we age: “Life begins at thirty,” or even “Life begins at forty.” But I am past forty now and still wondering, still waiting, for life to begin. And I am painfully aware that while I wait, the life that was there all along may indeed be passing me by.
Lincoln, of course, was also known for his humor and sometimes joyous storytelling. Shenk writes that “humor gave Lincoln some protection from his mental storms. It distracted him and gave him relief and pleasure. A good story, he said…puts new life into me.” Most visibly, it gave an entirely new appearance and meaning to that deeply lined face which gazes sorrowfully at us from the extant photographs. It must have been something quite memorable, then, to see Lincoln laugh. There seems no doubt that he was predisposed to melancholia, to depression. But Lincoln also achieved transcendence in every possible sense of the word. He grieved, he loved, he laughed, he endured. It’s a lesson, I hope, that I will eventually take to heart.
