Melancholy, melancholy: sometimes W. feels half-drowned in its great waves. And don't I feel it, too, wandering with him to the Hoe? The mourner, Freud tells us, learns to detach himself from the loved one he has lost. He leaves grief behind! He leaves loss!
But us? The melancholic cannot leave it behind. Indeed, he hardly knows what he has lost, having only a vague sense of deprivation, a vague sense of something that has gone missing.
He needs to localise his loss, W. says. To find its source! And he needn't look far. It's all my fault, he says. He's not sure why, he's not sure how, but somehow I am the cause of his melancholy.
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