The melancholic looks at everything with 100 year old eyes. I have seen it before, he says to himself, it is all the same. But the melancholic is drawn to the same because he wants to confirm in himself the dread that always prevented him from seeing the world as anything other than the correlate of his dread. The ultimate horror of the melancholic would be a world in which there is nothing to justify his melancholy. Fortunately this is not the case and never can be because this is the melancholic’s chance and his joy, since it is the state of the world which prevents his dread from devouring everything.
It is accurate to write of the black sun of depression, but it is a sun which reveals itself piecemeal, and not all at once. This is because melacholia is a form of attention and it is always possible to pick out something in the world to identify as a cause of that same melancholy. And even if one knows that to so choose risks falling under the category of Nietzsche’s ‘imaginary causes’ (a cause we invent for our own sake), it is still worthwhile, still righteous insofar as it is linked to the world’s plight, to the madness of the world. In these days, I have dreamt of an army of solitaries linked by their madness to the world’s madness, of the ones in whose blazing death might be discovered not the black sun of melancholia but a blazing world within this one, a utopia that can only be hatched from fire. Ah, but this is a melancholic’s dream.
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