Through conversation and viewing parts of the movie Vertigo, last Wednesday we discussed melancholy and what it means. Going into this discussion, I was not sure how sadness and melancholy differed. I thought of sadness as something you felt and tended to overlook melancholy and its meaning. When we looked into it further, it seems that sadness is something more fleeting and more of an emotional state. Melancholy at its roots is something that is actually a physical state. It used to be that there were four humors in the body that linked up with different physical aspects and seasons. Melancholy was black bile and connected with the autumn season.
Where melancholy comes into play is that it is something that everyone has to deal with at some point. It may not be something consistent but it is something we all face. Just like the seasons, it may come and go but we can also learn from it. As Sara pointed out, there is an almost beauty in it. Something beautiful comes from the struggles and the things we go through that help us grow. Many artists have their best work when they are dealing with a state of melancholy, the idea of a tortured artists. It gives them some way to find the beauty in their struggles.
While talking about Vertigo, we talked about the idea of things coming back. I love the idea that things come back to us in some way. Whether it is a lesson or a person, things have a way of reappearing in different forms to teach us something that we may have skipped or missed. Everything around us is a lesson and we are constantly learning and developing. People and things come into our life so that we can learn from them and come out different, never quite the same. This cafe was an interesting, eye opening experience about a topic I never gave much consideration. As always, I learned a lot and really enjoyed it.