Selected Book
Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
- Hardcover
- Author: Eric G. Wilson
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Release Date: January 2008
- ISBN-10: 0374240663
- ISBN-13: 9780374240660
- List Price: $20.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryAmericans are addicted to happiness. When we’re not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we’re supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let’s embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Strangely... Happiest Book Ever!
Rating:
This book took me by total surprise. Yes it talks about the value of melancholy. Yes it makes you think about all the darkness that exists. It talks about death... but in a really nice way. It kinda makes you happy. It's about taking life as it is... appreciating the dark and gothic... loving the beautiful mess that is life. I highly recommend this book. It's a quick read that you'll want to go through again and again.
Kindred spirit
Rating:
Although it could have been halved, making it an excellent essay rather than a pretty good book, all I could think was, "Thank God, somebody finally gets me!" ;-)
Existential Ruminations, Or, The Ironic Life
Rating:
It is really unfortunate that the Washington Post review is so prominent on the Amazon page. To be fair, it is a well-written review: it is precise and supported with the sort of concrete examples that demonstrate a close reading. On the other hand, it is so vituperative that one wonders why the reviewer even bothered; it almost seems suspicious.
I picked up the book despite the pause that the Post review gave me, and I am glad I did. This short book is, overall, a treat. Part manifesto, part literary criticism, part personal reflection, I see it as an essay in the etymological sense of the word (essai)--that is, as a "try" or an "attempt" to understand and explore a topic. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder if the book would have been received differently had Wilson been a Frenchman.
In any case, the book is a wonderful mixture of the poetic and the profound. Readers familiar with the likes of John Berger, Susan Sontag, and even Roland Barthes, will find something similar in Wilson's style, though no familiarity with these writers is necessary. Nor does one need to be familiar with Heidegger, de Beauvoir, or Ernest Becker, but one will sense their presence scattered about the pages.
What works about the book is that it is readable at so many different levels, offering something for academics as well as for a general audience. Never pedantic, Wilson's reflections on the nature of melancholia, sadness, suffering, death, but also of happiness, joy and beauty are at once inspiring, comforting, and always thought-provoking. It is not so much an argument against happiness, as it is a poetic meditation on living authentically: recognizing that "we are forever incomplete ... fragments of some ungraspable whole." And that the anxiety or despair that comes with the recognition that we are part of a "dying world" is also our "invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities...".
Wilson worries that our (peculiarly) American endeavor to eradicate unhappiness risks alienating us not only from our fears and anxieties, but also from much of what makes life worth living. Our supermodels all look alike, air-brushed on the covers of popular magazines. Gone is what Joseph Campbell (à la Joyce) would have called "aesthetic arrest," that which stops us in our tracks and overwhelms us with its uniqueness, sometimes its grotesqueness, sometimes its moribundity.
The book is so rich that one could go on and on, citing (as Wilson does) the lives of numerous artists, philosophers and psychologists on the topic. Some passages felt a bit repetitious, hence the four stars. Yet, overall, I found the book extremely rewarding. Late in the book Wilson reminds the reader of the importance of irony, something it is easy for us to confuse with cynicism or nihilism. The real irony, of course, is that you do not leave the book feeling glum or morose, but refreshed, invigorated.
Bombarded by advertising images and soundtracks that promise eternal happiness and fulfillment with the next purchase or pill, a little irony is probably just what we need.
Happiness is a bust!
Rating:
It's a bit of a dry read, but the overall comfort and joy of knowing I'm OK and not alone in my inability to ever truly reach an extended period of happiness is worth it.
Interesting in parts, but misses the elephant in the room
Rating:
This book attempts to tackle an interesting and important subject, but ultimately it's a somewhat difficult read unless you are an English/History/Philosophy Major. The book appears to wander around for a while, eventually settling on the notion that it's ok to be `melancholoy', because that state of mind is a requirement of creative genius.
As I see it, the real 'happiness crisis' in the US and Europe today is that we are bringing up a whole generation of children who think that there's something wrong with being sad/disappointed/melancholoy from time to time. We award trophies for merely taking part in sports as if no-one must be allowed to 'fail'. We tell our children that they are `brilliant' at everything, when they patently are not, and *could not* be. Our schools (at least k-5 and beyond) and health care professionals appear to be active participants in this 'happiness and achievement delusion'.
When I grew up in the 60s/70s, failure to win at something was greeted with parental guidance such as "never mind, as long as you did your best [get over it]" or, "its taking part that matters [not just winning]". Today, our kids get a silver-colored cup and a certificate of achievement just for showing up.
So what happens when it dawns on these children (or young adults) that they aren't destined to play for the Yankees or swim in the Olympics? For some, it appears to be depression and a feeling of lack of self-worth. Why do so my teenagers - particularly girls - harm themselves? Perhaps because we've given them an unrealistic view of themselves in the world: We have failed to impart that it's ok to feel sad sometimes; that's its ok not to look like a fashion model; that its ok to lose sometimes; and, that we can't all be the `best at everything' so long as we give it our best shot. The current parenting solution to this self-created crisis appears to be to pharmacological.
This book could have considered these issues and possible solutions in much more detail, which I had originally thought was part of the thesis.
Still, in my opinion the book certainly deserves three stars for raising a difficult subject and I hope the author follows up with something that's a little less academic.
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