The melancholic person, outside of their sorrow—when they no longer remember the absence of the other—where do they reside? Their skin, stripped of the armor of grief, burns particle by particle in the air of a meaningless world.
Kabul 24: without a story, without real responsibility, without hope, without any role assigned to them. They are a wandering soul who has taken the time of the world. Even without their sorrow, they do not suffer. Sorrow for them is like a cane for the blind.
The world only finds meaning under the strikes of the cane. The blind person without a cane is lost in darkness.
The melancholic person, without their sorrow—after forgetting the loss that once grieved them—has no role in the world.Keeping oneself sorrowful is accepting a role, and this role gives meaning to the details of the world. When the melancholic emerges from their sorrow, they do not become happy.
They come face to face with the pervasive meaninglessness of the world.They realize that their sorrow, regardless of its object, was their final defensive layer for giving meaning to the world.
They had perceived all their other emotions through the mediation of melancholy: they became happy in their mourning. They became sad in their mourning.
They became hopeful in their mourning and through their mourning.The melancholic interprets the world with their sorrow. This is the last stronghold against the terror of confronting the world’s meaninglessness: let the responsibility of one single thing rest on me. Let me be responsible for preserving the sorrow of something lost that will never return.
This “never” turns into “forever” in my responsibility. Forever I can suck the blood of this absence like a leech so that the world does not lose its meaning and its color.
Even if the absent one is capable of returning—the dead appear in my dreams, the traitor returns to apologize, I see a forgotten friend in a crowd of strangers on the street, we pass each other and pretend not to know one another—what remains unmoved is the melancholic’s desire to preserve the absence.
Even if the absent one returns, the force and density of their absence is greater than they are.The absence of the other gives more meaning to the melancholic’s world than the person themselves.
By clinging to the absence of the other, the melancholic invents a hole in their soul into which any returnee falls and disappears.With this hole, agency finally falls into the hands of the melancholic: for the first time, they take the command of their life.
The experience of self-sufficiency. For the first time, they become independent even from others, from the world.They need neither the world nor others, but rather the absence of them, so that their world may have meaning. In the absence of others, they have everything needed to give meaning to their life: time, an emotion that does not change with the other’s comings and goings, a meaning sucked from the breast of this feeling/mourning.
The melancholic lives inside a bubble of meaning.Outside this bubble, there is no difference from inside it. The meaning of the bubble lies only in the continuity of its invisible shell. Trying to pull the melancholic out of their bubble of sorrow is an attempt to confront them with the reality of the meaningless world: “Look! Even your mourning, like the rest of the world, has no meaning.” But empathy with the melancholic person has different coordinates.If a friend says to you about themselves, “Do you see how beautiful I am?” out of empathy [in Schopenhauer’s sense: Mit-leid, co-suffering], you inevitably confirm it: yes, I see.
But if a friend says to you, “I hate myself,” your empathy splits into two branches. Either you must confirm them: yes, I hate you too. Or you must deny it: no, that’s not true—which in this case means you have not even recognized their words. You have not even granted them the right to hate.
They were not even worthy of an opinion about themselves. Empathy with the melancholic, however, is a third branch of empathy: neither confirmation nor denial. The melancholic has no question about themselves.
Empathy with the melancholic is possible only through discovering the invisible shell of my own bubble of mourning: “Yes, I too am surrounded by an absence.
I remembered.Now let me touch your bubble’s shell with the shell of my own mania.” Touching two bubbles: I can only remember my own absences by seeing you; this is the only thing I can do for you.
The melancholic wants only one thing from the other: that they remember.That they do not forget. The melancholic does not want empathy; they want complicity. So that the world they have built on the basis of remembrance and absence does not lose its validity.
So that they may be sure that remembrance is the dignity of the world: the only way for the meaningless world to remain meaningful still and yet, is to forget forgetting.
The melancholic is only at ease in the moment when they see that everyone is occupied with the inevitable remembrance of themselves: when the crowd of people becomes an archipelago of remembrance, and the world has as many different meanings as there are inconsolable grievers.
