Melancholy, melancholy: W. feels half-drowned by its waves. And don't I feel it, too, wandering through the heather?
The mourner, Freud says, learns to detach himself from what he has lost. He leaves grief behind; he leaves loss. But the melancholic cannot leave it behind, and comes to identify with what has gone missing. I am my loss, he says. I am nothing other than my loss. His life, his very existence, is indistinguishable from a kind of tomb.
I am my loss, and nothing other than my loss: isn't this what W. says to himself? Isn't that why he feels so unworthy, so wrong? I cannot live; I cannot exist: so the melancholic. While I live, there is no hope, so the one who cannot leave behind his grief. And in W.'s case? – 'While you live, there is no hope', he says. No hope for him, for any rate. 'While you live, I can't exist'. I've entombed his hopes within me, buried them there. He's suffocating to death in the airless room of my life.
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