GRF Sara’s talk on melancholy left a few impressions on me. First, it allowed me to redefine my usage of the word and have a more keen eye for it in everyday life. Before the café, I would’ve defined melancholy as a deep sadness, but would have neglected the temporal component of the definition, which I now consider to be crucial. The resulting mental state is made much less acute via the addition of the drawn-out quality, and as a result perhaps much more subversive. Thinking about it now, it seems like most people have some degree of melancholy, regardless of whether or not it always manifests itself. Everybody regrets, longs for things of the past, and mourns the image of things that never came to be. Because of this, I now hold the opinion that perfectly happy people can hold some degree of melancholy, and that the two are not in opposition.

Also, I need to watch more Hitchcock. That’s the second impression.