For your insignificant pleasure, I send profound sorrow

Lately, if you look around, you'll always see something about how to have a good time —how to be fulfilled, how to be motivated, to be successful, to find your own happiness.

Go to Google and immediately have a cure for melancholy: some promise 10 or 15 simple steps may make you happy, some promise as long as 3 steps.

Whatever the melancholy experience, it's a process that requires reflection: a spiritual immersion, like making tea. What if all the advice that makes you happy doesn't work? What if you were born depressed?

Melancholy, unlike sadness, is not caused by something specific, such as unemployment, the death of a pet, miscarriage, or health problems. Melancholy doesn't disappear just because you hear good news, like when a movie star buys the rights to your novel, or when you're invited to visit the Venice Biennale for free.

Melancholy is more... Something fleeting.

It came like smoke, like fog, basically uninvited. Some are born noble, wealthy, and privileged, while others are born with a melancholy disposition.

Long before I met my deceased biological father, I understood what melancholy was all about. My father, Dr. Leon Stover, wrote the Suicide Manifesto on a typewriter, and the faded gray ink recorded his melancholy musings as a patient at a psychiatric hospital in New York, from whom my mother had left. I didn't see my father until I was 21. When I learned that melancholy was my inherited artistic talent, I felt some comfort. This is a gene that has a greater influence on my heart than the genealogical connection with Frederick II of Prussia and President Eisenhower.

In that Manifesto, my father explained his spiritual healing process, writing: "For your insignificant pleasures and pains, I send far-reaching tragedies and glorious sorrows..."

With his polarized melancholy mania (he died of complications from diabetes, but I don't doubt he also wrote some suicide notes), my father, a writer who has published 24 books, wrote to me:

"I don't know if you're going to be a writer, but you have that 'restless' quality. Use it creatively or people will think you're just a mediocre fool. ”

Although my surroundings were not happy, my childhood was still twinkling with stories and fantasies about elven angels; my teenage years were mixed with artistic burnout and poetic depression—and I moved many times.

When I transferred to my 3rd high school, I felt very isolated. I decided not to make any friends, but only to communicate with the tree and feel the inner world of the tree. I walked along the lonely railroad tracks behind my house, with odd thoughts in my head, and then wrote on a piece of paper that began, "I can't watch another gray dawn being awakened..." (melancholy is often not much different from a stage play).

My English teacher took me out to study alone, during which I wrote some existential prose and drew some distorted paintings.

I made friends with a much less inconspicuous little leprechaun named Erica, with countless long ribbons tied around her hair, not tied in fashionable bows, but listlessly dangling like weeping tendrils, like some sort of mournful ornament. She wore a long skirt, or colorful corduroy trousers, with the cuffs rolled up as if she were wading across the river, and a fox bib pinned to her shoulder.

She carried bottles of ink everywhere she went, then wrote her homework with a pen and translated Latin words like "Oh, the terrible dead cypress..."

She read the poems I wrote and incited me to sneak out of the study room window and watch old movies at the Smithsonian institution. She doesn't think I'm weird just because I like bats. She never forced me to "smile" or "be happy." She saved me.

Grief has a bad reputation. But I began to sense that the word melancholia—a late Latin word that had evolved from the Greek word "melancholia"—had a romantic old-world aura and a fleeting beauty like the glow of the moon. We read it in Keats's Ode onmelancholy.

"When the melancholy suddenly strikes / Like a cloud of weeping in the air / She lives with the United States - Beauty, with the doom of death..."

Although depression is a disease, the word is used everywhere and loses its charm. In contrast, it feels good to be immersed in a melancholy cloud: go to a sad black-and-white movie, or be blown away by a gust of wind, sounding like The Grass Harp described by Capote.

In the pre-advent of antidepressants, melancholy was cherished. For example, The 16th-century British scholars at Oxford University (who wrote the subject in 3 volumes and gave dietary advice for plant-based healing), the 19th-century poets, and the radiant and sad Greta Garbo.

While most modern characters lack this melancholy charm, melancholy is celebrated by Tim Burton (The Melancholy Death of the Oyster Boy and Other Stories, and Johnny Depp's role in The Bolton films); by Batman (The Dark Knight); by Sicliffe of Wuthering Heights, and by Lester, the melancholy, melancholy vampire leicester written by Anne Rice.

It also comforts me to see the emotional villain named "Sadness" in the recent animated film "Mind Task Force" and the energetic, grinning "Joy" save the protagonist's day.

American commercial films are generally not so inclusive.

Clinique's best-selling perfume is sweet, neon-colored, passionate "happy." With apples, plums, bergamot and a fresh-smelling note, whatever it is, this fragrance has been described as "a happy perfume with the essence of a bright and happy morning".

The other perfumes that sold out in 2015 are basically this marshmallow sweet tone: just like at a carnival, animal dolls that are always bright and fancy can win more attention.

For me, I'd rather open the window and enjoy the melancholy garden scent that comes over melancholy, with a smell of burnout, contemplation, and loss. This mild perfume smells like autumn rain, or rain-soaked window edges, mixed with withered roses and tears.

Perfumes with rainy atmospheres are good for improving mood: frédérick malle's "en passant" perfume, for example. Guerlain was an expert on melancholy, and in 1912 introduced the twilight-like "l'heure bleue" (blues time). Then there's the late 19th-century jicky, sensually shiny, described as a charming and melancholy fragrance with hints of citrus, lavender and dusty books. In addition, there is mitsouko, a fruity aroma from 1919.

None of these perfumes have a bright sunny taste, and they will not laugh loudly, in fact, they will not even smile. Serge Lutens' iris silver mist fragrance (1994) was reviewed on basenotes.net as "Sadness in a Bottle" and "Melancholy Wonders". We need perfumes that celebrate our mood and soul, not just the lines we do in the office and at cocktail parties.

When I saw this passage on the perfume blog, I felt that my desire was not so lonely:

"I've been feeling a little depressed lately, to be honest, just depressed. Can you recommend a few perfumes that reflect my mood? I don't want those inspiring scents because sadness is something I need to experience in my life. ”

Like this frustrated soul, I don't need perfumes that make myself happy. Happiness, like the sun, dangling ridiculously brightly, is a hope you can't count on, or even look at it directly.

If sorrow strikes, you might welcome it, put on the most fitting housecoat, sit on the most comfortable sofa or recliner, or lie in a hammock between two elm trees. Let the sorrow settle down.

You might also accompany a pot of green tea, watch the curly leaves stretch out poetically as they soak, listen to Ravel's daphnis et chloé, or the second movement of France's Piano Concerto.

I propose not only melancholy perfumes, but also melancholy clothes, shoes (no running shoes anyway), music (lana del rey is a melancholy heroine, joni mitchell and billie holiday are good), potions (alcohol-free; just look at Poe's fate), and the ideal furniture designed to indulge in melanie.

What I want is moonlight.

(Note: This chapter article is reproduced from Curiosity Daily, and the copyright of this article belongs to Curiosity Daily (qdaily))