No Worst There is None

 It usually comes to me at night, this melancholia. It appears "when we are caught without/ People or drink," as Larkin put it. Perhaps I have just had to urinate for the third time in an hour from having had too much tea, when all I want to do is lie still and sleep. 

I feel a kind of cosmic boredom in these moments. I think how little I enjoyed this evening. And how there will be another after it. And another. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. "And suppose tomorrow and tomorrow, and then nobody there"—as a character in Faulkner puts it. 

I know, of course, that with the coming of the morning, I will have my coffee, and I will start to look forward to the day ahead again. I know the little goals and excitements and obligations that fill the day will start to pull me along the thread of living. 

But at night, there is nothing more to dread or anticipate. And so all the anxieties and hopes of the day suddenly seem to stand revealed as so many excuses and procrastinations. All they do is delay the confrontation with the emptiness that lies back of it all. 

"When the errors have been used up/ As our last companion, facing us/ Sits nothingness," as Brecht once wrote. (Hamburger trans.)

With the lengthening of adulthood, I've generally come to recognize how dependent these feelings are on a passing state of chemical disequilibrium. I know that I usually only feel this way when I have had too much caffeine and cannot sleep; or made the mistake of consuming alcohol. 

These, then, have simple solutions: don't drink; don't have coffee less than twelve hours before you plan to go to sleep. Easy rules to follow. And in learning to follow them—much that I once thought of as the tragic hopelessness of the human condition turns out to be a mere byproduct of an ill-considered beverage.

But occasionally, I forget. I neglect my rules. And the melancholy comes. 

And the worst of it is that it always seems to come in the form of a realization. Like the devil, it never makes it easy for us to recognize it for what it is. It never drops its cloak and declares: I am that extra caffeine you had in the afternoon; I am that beer you drank at dinner. 

Instead it says: I am the truth you only now are seeing—now, that the "people or drink" are gone—now, that the distractions are all fled—now that the "errors have been used up"—I, the truth, am your last companion. 

And "no worst, there is none," as Hopkins wrote of his depression. "Oh the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / [...] Hold them cheap / May who ne'er hung there." 

But even this, has an answer. Even this, is experience. Even this—despair—that "carrion comfort," as Hopkins elsewhere called it—is a fate gone through. It is a story. And therefore, it is a thing that can be told. It is a thing that can be written about, thought about—refined through intellectual toil.

As James Thomson wrote—in reflection on Dürer's image of the angel of Melancholia: 

Baffled and beaten back she works on still,                 

    Weary and sick of soul she works the more,

  Sustained by her indomitable will:

    The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,

  And all her sorrow shall be turned to labour[.]