I don’t want to say that modern life is a jungle. That we have tamed the wild of nature in creating our civilizations, and yet allowed the random and the chaos to remain. That although we might not fear the tiger and the boa in our daily walks, we still have great monsters to fear, monsters that we have neither the guns to shoot nor the armor to protect us from. I don’t want to say such things.
Nor do I want to imply that I have walked farther, faster, stronger. That I have seen more. I haven’t seen anything. I have felt a smoldering unease in my gut on warm August evenings, and I have danced with a pretty girl once or twice.
But when arriving in a new city some orientation is welcome to even the most seasoned traveler. And I’ve been to this city. I know my way around. I offer you some points of interest, some ways around town.
Wistfulness
This is a tender sadness. Romantic. It is full of an inexpressible feeling of things being better, more real, more fun, sometime, somewhere. Of the old house, where you could dance to music that felt fresh and new. Of the old town, with the easy river access that no one would even use because there was a new mall just built. But wistfulness forgets that those times weren’t happy while they were occurring. They’re only happy now, in retrospect, in relation to the present. Some pieces were better, sure, but some pieces were much much worse. The conservative political movement was founded on such wistfulness, although they’d never call it that.
Lethargy
This is a poor excuse for sadness. This is dragging a sack of tuba bells behind you. Where are you taking them? This slows you down, slows everyone down. The world is a fast-moving place. If you are going to canter on the sidewalk at a narrow section, look behind you and notice all the eager people who can’t squeeze by you, who just want to make it to the end of the block to buy a burrito. These are prisoners of your lethargy. There is no problem with dwelling in the circles of sadness, but, like with suicide, don’t drag anyone else down with you. It’s only sporting.
Melancholy
The Greeks thought that this came from an excess of black bile. But where does the black bile come from? Are you born with it? Do you inhale it somehow? Is it related to diet? Does it start off a different color and then turn black? How much time can you spend thinking about black bile before you start to get sick?
That aside, this is perhaps the best type of sadness to achieve. It is very romantic, very noble-seeming. Morrissey sang about it often. "When we’re driving in your car I never never want to go home, because I haven’t got one anymore."
This is a thrilling type of sadness. Your body screams with a sort of joy, if joy can be taken out of its normal association with happiness. The sadness of a grocery store that is well lit and full of pretty girls you’ll never talk to. The sadness of a glimpse of the city you live in from the crest of a hill, bridges drawn to let a barge through. The sadness from only being allowed to live one life, and having to choose what to do, and not muck it up by spreading yourself too thin. The sadness of not being able to be everywhere at once, to be at every party, audit every course, drive every parkway, taste every dessert. The sadness of loving a song, wanting to live inside a song, wanting to kiss everyone you see. The sadness of having a body, of not being able to levitate and glide down the hill. The sadness of walking through a library, feeling like you’re in a morgue, wanting to rescue every ignored book with an unexciting cover, knowing that no matter how many books you read, you’ll still never even read one tenth of one percent of all the books at your shitty local library.
This sadness isn’t to be tossed aside. This sadness will take you somewhere, will admit you to certain clubs. Clubs you want to be in. Let it take you.
Depression
This is serious. This is the finger of God on your chest, pinning you down. Not the God that children pray to at night, asking for help with passing the next level on their video game. This is the God who hates the naked body, who hates dancing, the cartoon God who gets cranky when He leans back on a cloud and accidentally sits on a thunderbolt, and who throws that thunderbolt down with not a care in the world whom it might hit. You are stuck under the finger of God, a thick, almost concrete finger. He uses the power of leverage to keep you down with just that one finger.
This is being unemployed and being too sad to look for work. To even make a phone call when you see a promising advertisement for employment. To even answer the phone when someone is calling, possibly with work. To even check messages. This is having a gun and being too limp to point it at your head, instead letting it pull your arm down, discharging into your foot. Yes, this is very truly shooting yourself in the foot.
Torpor
This is a similar sluggishness to lethargy, only livened by the dictionary’s whimsical suffixing of the word for adjectival use into torporific.
Regret
This will get you nowhere. Time is an arrow, yes? Or a river? So they say. Scientists, at least. Time is not a boomerang. Time is not Tivo. Time is not an airport shuttle. Time does not loop around and come back for stragglers. Time does not exchange your ticket if you slept through the boarding call. Time is not a pigeon, with a compass in its beak. Time doesn’t know where it’s going. It doesn’t care. Time cuts through canyons and farmlands, through homes and cities. Time takes the easiest route. Regret implies that time has some sort of culpability. Time takes no such responsibility! Time issues no receipts. Time is a barreling, loose locomotive, sliding down the tracks. Off the tracks. It could end up anywhere. In your living room. In a lake. There are no published schedules. There are no return trips. Regret will leave you at the station every time. At what you think is a station. And after hours and days of waiting there, you finally look around and see that what you thought was a station is really just a phone booth, a drinking fountain, a pile of stones. It’s a cardboard cutout of a shelter. It falls to soggy pieces in your hands, like pulling up a spoonful of discount corn flakes.
Gloom
This is an affectation. Something you apply, like a nametag with the wrong name on it. Something that you can easily take off. Of course it does the job of making people uneasy, which can be useful.
Guilt
This is a self-imposed verdict, handed down by a jury deep inside your heart. There is no punishment, however; no penance. So the guilt remains. If only hard labor could work it off. If only solitary confinement could make it right. Perhaps the judgment should come with a sentence. Why not? The jury is all imagined, anyway. Perhaps the sentence could be baking a cobbler, or going to the big bookstore in town and buying a daily newspaper from a city you’ve never been to. Arbitrary, sure, but not any more arbitrary than the punishments they hand out in real courtrooms.
Sorrow
This kind of sadness is untouchable. Noble. You can only attain sorrow if something bad has actually happened to you, which sets it apart from most other types of sadness. Sorrow is something you wear, like a cloak. People can see it on you and they don’t ask you to remove it when you come into their house from the cold. In fact, they’re pleased to see someone wearing such a finely tailored garment. They look at their own clothes and realize how cheap they’ve been. They are envious that you were given such a gift. They have that thought momentarily, of being envious, and then they turn away from it, ashamed that they would wish for such a heavy thing. They put it out of their mind as an untruth, but that only proves how true it is to them.
Existential Sadness
This is a sadness at the state of being sad. This is acknowledgment of the futility of being human, of thinking about sadness, of writing lists of the different kinds of sadness.
Unhappiness
This is not sadness. This is temporary. You spend your whole life at a cocktail party, hosted by influential and powerful people. Rich people. Not to say that you are rich or powerful or influential yourself necessarily, but you’ve been invited to their party. You belong there. You can tell the difference between a torte and a tart just by glancing at a teetering silver tray. You don’t enjoy menthols, but you’ll accept them if that’s all that’s offered to you. You know why Foucault was important to your own sense of sexuality, and you can put your finger on it. You can even make a joke about that. You laugh at the right moments, along with everyone else. You put your hand on someone else’s forearm when you reach the exciting part of the story.
Unhappiness is when you step outside the party for a brief respite. You walk out on the veranda and you are momentarily surprised at how dark and cold it has gotten since you arrived at the party. Your arms cross your chest and you hold your shoulders in a tight shiver as you look over at hedges, boulevards. You sense something wrong. Nothing is wrong. You can turn around and go back to the party. The door is unlocked.
Dismay
This is only for kings and vicars. The shame of having to abdicate the throne before it was time. The disappointment in hearing about the divorce of a man and woman in one’s parish; a man and woman who were counseled only once on the subject of divorce, who were told to give it a thousand more chances, because God gives you so many chances.
Dismay can only befall you if you own an estate, or live in a soap opera. Dismay is when your fortunes have gone south, and your fortunes include oil wells and dairy farms. Dismay is righteous and grand, and bigger and more important than most anything, worthy of headlines on the front page of regional newspapers, just below the fold. But its depth is no match for most other kinds of sadnesses. It is only in the minor leagues, hoping for a spot on the roster.
Happiness
Don’t let the name fool you. This is also sadness.
This is perhaps the most desperate form of sadness there is. Think of all the lists you make, full of reasons why you should be happy, why you are happy, dammit. Apple wedges with cheese. City parks. The volatility of the stock market. They way she hugged you from behind, unexpectedly, at that New Year’s Eve party. Aren’t those all the same items on your list of reasons for being sad? Happiness is running with a mix tape to the post office just before it closes, having quickly thrown on a baseball-style shirt with a number on the back because of the heat. But it’s only for the moment, what you call happiness. It won’t last. You’re wearing a t-shirt with pleated pants, which looks stupid. Everyone can see that.