Sober Thoughtfulness

Last night I sat down with the most recent issue of The New Yorker and discovered two treasures inside — an article by Orhan Pamuk and a short story by Marguerite Duras. Since I have written about both of them here in recent weeks it was quite a lovely surprise to find them both in my favorite magazine.

Pamuk’s article was a delightful little piece on getting his first passport at the age of 7 so he and his brother could go to Geneva to be with his parents. It was not a happy experience and he wound up going back to Istanbul where he stayed for the next 23 years. One of the things I love about Pamuk’s writing is what he refers to as “the Turkish national melancholia”. I liked that and have been thinking about it ever since I read his Istanbul. Melancholy is an interesting subject to me.

If you look it up in the dictionary, melancholy is described as depression and sadness but there is a third definition that I like “sober thoughtfulness”. I find that in Pamuk’s work as I do in Marguerite Duras’s writing. The strange thing is that, while there is that element of soberness, and wistfulness, there is an accompanying wry humor that lends a considerable amount of charm to their work. It’s as if they are saying, “Oh well, the world is nuts, what can you do? But isn’t it amusing, too?” And it is.

I remember reading a story by Duras about a young English pilot who was shot down during WWII in a small town in France. The war was days from being over and this bold young 20 year old pilot was launching his attacks on the German troops wherever he could find them. One night his plane was shot down and landed atop a tree in a French village. He was nearly dead and the people of the village had no means to rescue him. So they gathered around the tree with torches and what musical instruments they had. All night long they sang to him and prayed for him and kept him company until his spirt left this world. The next day they managed to free his body from the wreckage. He was only a boy of 20, they didn’t even know his name. But they carried his body to one of their homes, cleaned it and washed it and wrapped it. They buried him by the church and every day they put flowers on his grave. For years and years. When Duras visited the village in the 1970s they were still putting flowers on the grave of this young, unknown, brave British pilot and they spoke of him with tender affection and admiration as if he belonged to them.

It is a beautiful story and very melancholy in its own way. In the post Elizabethan era there was a cult of the melancholy and many poets, musicians and artists created out of the sort of sober thoughtfulness of the times. Later, the Romantics, and especially the pre-Raphaelites revived the cult of melancholy and painted beautiful but terribly sad women such as Shakespeare’s drowned Ophelia floating in a flower filled stream.

Maybe we need periods of melancholy in our lives to give us permission to feel the depths that we are often too busy to allow ourselves. Last night, after I read Pamuk’s article, I rummaged in my CDs until I found Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with it’s beautifully melancholic Adagietto. It was a lovely thing to listen to on a cold, sleet-filled night.

And it was a good reminder to me that there are times when we need periods of sober thoughtfulness to help us see the subtle beauties and craziness that makes our lives so rich. One of the old medical treatises on melancholia, when it was still considered a disease, prescribed, as treatment, “much music and some dance”. That might be a prescription we could all make more use of.”

Thanks for reading.