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SHIFT · 2023
- Lo2
- Sl
- Mx
- Hs
- Hr
I’m Left With Everything to Gain
Melancholy colors the wandering, the sweetness of the search inseparable from the sadness of not yet arriving.
Melancholy
Confluence
EXTREME
RARE
MID-HIGH · Trans-Warm
Bittersweet. Beauty inseparable from sadness, in which neither can be removed without destroying the other. Melancholy occurs only as a fusion; sadness with beauty laid on top is a different state and comes apart under pressure.
The word
Greek melaina chole, black bile, the humor ancient medicine blamed for the condition. A question attributed to Aristotle asked why exceptional men are melancholic, and the association with depth never left. Robert Burton needed more than a thousand pages for The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621 and kept enlarging it until he died.
The feeling
Sadness with the lights left on. The world looks more beautiful in it, not less: dusk, rain and endings acquire a finish they lack in ordinary light. It is slow, reflective, and strangely productive; thought deepens where sadness would stall it. You do not want out of it with any urgency, which is the surest sign you are in it.
Against its neighbours
Sadness wants to end; melancholy would rather not, since ending it means losing the beauty along with the ache. Mono no Aware belongs to the observed thing and lifts when you look away; melancholy belongs to the observer and follows you out of the room.
In the work
A palette that will not resolve to warm or cool. The piece reads as both at once and does not settle.
1 work composed with Melancholy
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