A sense of loss escalating to destruction is a consequence of the depletion of the world: if the world is lost, then I am lost, too. The first sign of depletion is aimless yearning (“This unhappy inclination to all places where I am not, to things which are not mine, lies completely within me,” admits the Romantic writer Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (quoted in Benjamin, “German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters”), a prime manifestation of which is nostalgia: though the persons in question long for home, the pain felt is shoreless and unappeasable. They surrender to the attraction of nothingness. The word “nostalgia” originally meant “homesickness,”7 and down to the present day it has been seen as one of the “causes” or subspecies of melancholia (melancholia nostalgica). The narrow meaning of “homesickness”8 was gradually altered, and it became synonymous with breaking away from orderliness in general.9 The loss of something always results in “disorder” (the accustomed order breaks up), and it is always some unforeseen incident, suddenly breaking into order and threatening it, that the sense of loss implies. (One of Thomas Mann’s finest and most melancholic stories, “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” brilliantly portrays the profound kinship of order-upsetting disarray and grief.) The function of order is to fend off chance, to make the world cozy (one readily finds one’s way about when things have been set right): “I would sooner commit an injustice than tolerate disorder,” Goethe noted in his report on the siege of Mainz about his stopping a mob from lynching a person (quoted in Peter Boerner, Goethe, 67). In this instance, the disorderliness is death appearing in the form of a murder that even Goethe could only delay. No order is able to cover up disorder and threat forever. The greater the order, the more oppressive life is — that applies equally to totalitarian forms of state and petit bourgeois homes. The universal sense of loss that melancholics feel is manifested in their relationship to order and disorder: in his poem The Spleen (1737), Matthew Green advised those who suffer from spleen (that is, melancholia) to seek a cure far from town, in a tranquil, well-ordered rural environment. Writing about mental illnesses a century later, in 1838, Esquirol noted their correlation with social disorder: “In every century, the ruling ideas powerfully influence both the frequency and the character of mental illness. . The ideals of freedom and reform disturbed the minds of many people in France, and it is noteworthy that in the lunacies which have been breaking out for the last thirty years one can recognize the characteristics of those storms which have brought our homeland into upheaval” (Esquirol, Des maladies mentales considerées sous les rapports medical, hygiénique, et medico-légal, 1:43). (Statistics show that between 1786 and 1813, the number of mental patients in France doubled.) Disorder, however, is not pure negativity: it is not an absolute opposite of order, just as illness is not an absolute opposite of health. Disorder is not a fait accompli (not just “disarray,” chaos) but a threat: it appears only in relation to order, which, because it is not a divine formation but the result of human endeavor, is under threat from the very outset — if from nowhere else then from the direction of death, which raises man from the orderliness produced by life. Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann noted the following case with regard to the profoundly melancholic Kant:
In the course of his lectures he would usually look at a nearby member of the audience in order, so to say, to read from the face if he had been understood. At such times he would be troubled by the most insignificant trifle, especially if it disturbed the natural or accepted order of things and thereby upset the order of his train of thought as well. In one of his lectures his absent-mindedness became singularly apparent. At noon Kant informed me that he was continually getting stuck in his thoughts because a button was missing from the coat of one of the members of the audience seated directly in front of him. His attention and his thoughts kept returning to it unwittingly, and that was why he became so absent-minded.
(quoted in Groß, Immanuel Kant, 135)
Kant’s near-pathological partiality for neatness was also noted by Wasianski, another of the biographers:
Over the long course of years he developed his own settled, invariable way of living to such an extent that he was perturbed if a pair of scissors or a penknife lay on the table at another angle from the usual direction, especially if it had slipped an inch or two; and if the place of one of the larger objects, such as a chair, was changed in his room, to say nothing of the number of seats being increased or reduced, then he would become completely discomposed, with his attention continually returning to the place of the chair until order was fully restored.
(ibid.)
Disarray, an eternal threat to order, is the source of melancholia that undermines life at its foundations; but since sooner or later everything gets mixed up anyway, disorder is not so much the cause as the consequence of melancholia: obsessed with order, man comes across melancholia and ends up disrupting the ties of order himself. Kierkegaard was convinced that despondency would help the man who lived in secure circumstances in a crowded city to find his way back to the basic principles of life, which, in his view, were truly felt only by those who lived in solitude — and by sailors. Likewise, Walter Benjamin, in writing about well-ordered and planned metropolises, found that it was the prostitutes loitering in the gateways of Berlin tenements or on railway platforms who provided a glimpse into nothingness from a secure life. Beyond a certain point, order is not merely practical neatness but an intolerable prison. An angrily destructive melancholic carries out a kind of prison revolt. In
The House of the Dead
, Dostoevsky reports on murderers who for decades had been decent, reliable villagers; beyond their taciturnity, nothing about them indicated that one day, all of a sudden, they would pick up an axe and slaughter their best friends. There is no necessity to commit mayhem, however; there are other ways of revolting against order. According to Dr. Watson, “Save for the occasional use of cocaine, [Sherlock Holmes] had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as
a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.”
10
Melancholia is not an uprising, a revolt, or a reconciliation: the sense of the world is depleted in the eyes of the melancholic, and therefore, terrified as he is of disorder, he is also unable to become preoccupied with order. Günter Grass, who subjected melancholia to a searching inquiry, wrote in his journal that in our time, melancholia is to be found at the conveyor belt, discerning its cause in the fact that production quotas have become the determining principle of life (Grass, From the Diary of a Snail, 254).11 Life at the conveyor belt does not necessarily lead to melancholia, however; apathy is not the same as melancholia: for that, a breakaway from order is also required. Whether the melancholic has to part with an object or a loved one, he feels that he is confronting nothingness: for him, the possibility of breaking away is proof that the coherence of the orderly world is just apparent, and sooner or later everything will fall to bits. Melancholia does not emerge from sheer order (which does not exist anyway) but out of the inevitable cracks concealed in order. One truly experiences the pain of loss only if one has a strong link to whatever has been lost, and that same response applies to a loss of order: the melancholic must make a superhuman effort to preserve order, he must be well aware of what has been lost, and he must perceive that he did everything he could on his part to protect his life from being threatened (before rebelling against his fate, Hercules first completed all his labors, set the world to rights in his own fashion). It is telling that in the Middle Ages, mathematicians and geometricians were considered to be melancholic.12 Tertullian called the genii of mathematicians and astrologers fallen angels (in the Middle Ages, melancholia was a sin), and Henry of Ghent differentiated two types of people: those who are capable of stepping out of the domain of finitude and of thinking about transcendent beings such as angels, and those who, remaining prisoners of the empirical world, feel comfortable only in a directly and transparently perceivable world. The latter will become melancholics: “Whatever they think, it is something spatial (quantum), or else it is located in space like a point. Such people are therefore melancholic, and make the best mathematicians, but the worst metaphysicians” (quoted in Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 227). (Mathematicians are sad, Martin Luther said, and in Dürer’s Melencolia I there are instruments alluding to geometry.) Mathematicians organize the world and then become disconsolate: the only way out of the prison leads to nothingness.