Melancholy and all its beauty in origin

Sara presented an extremely insightful presentation of melancholy with showing her exploration into not only its English roots but also its connections to literary pieces. I always treated melancholy as a word used for description but never knew the origins of the word. Melancholy actually means literally black pile and is associated with the season of autumn, since it is cold and dry. This root gives us a feeling that melancholy naturally happens. It brings up the question whether we are just melancholy or not or does melancholy naturally come upon us. I do feel sometimes that even though people might not be affected by melancholy for long periods of time, we are most likely to be affected when autumn and change of seasons occur. We associate melancholy with depression but actually there is a difference that you can see in the roles of the emotion in different disorders like bipolar. Sara offers the side of melancholy to be important in the development of individuality. She delves into Freud’s interesting perspective in which melancholy can be related to love in which we can love and hate something at the same time. When that is gone, we tend to feel guilt and have this attachment to the past that makes us be in melancholy. This type of melancholy is beautifully displayed in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie ‘Vertigo’, which from the scenes showed to us seems like it is a great movie that I might be interested in seeing. The scenes that were shown to us was setting the incident that melancholy can be associated with remembering the past in an almost beautiful way. This beauty with melancholy was especially seen when the detective is observing Madeline in the museum as she has her hair twirled into a simple spiral fashion and bouquet of roses. Overall, Sara’s presentation was incredibly insightful and changed my perspective on melancholy.

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