Therapy

blind, lying awake in the night, dark on dark.
    One of the depressing things about depression is knowing that there are lots of people in the world with far more reason to feel depressed than you have, and finding that, so far from making you snap out of your depression, it only makes you despise yourself more and thus feel more depressed. The purest form of depression is when you can give absolutely no reason why you’re depressed. As B says, in Either/Or, “A person in sorrow or distress knows why he sorrows or is distressed. If you ask a melancholic what it is that weighs down on him, he will reply, ‘I don’t know what it is, I can’t explain it.’ Therein lies melancholy’s infinitude.”
    I’m beginning to get the hang of this peculiar book. The first part consists of the papers of A — jottings, essays like “The Unhappiest Man”, and a journal called The Seducer’s Diary , which is supposed to have been edited by A, but written by someone else called Johannes. A is a young intellectual layabout who suffers from depression, only he calls it melancholy, and makes a cult of it. In the Diary Johannes describes how he seduces a beautiful innocent girl called Cordelia, just to see if he can pull it off against all the odds, and then callously discards her when he succeeds:
     
now it is over and I want never to see her again... Now all resistance is impossible, and only when it is there is it beautiful to love; once it is gone, love is only weakness and habit.
     
    It’s not clear whether we’re supposed to think The Seducer’s Diary is something A found, or that he made it up, or that it’s really a disguised confession. It’s riveting stuff, anyway, though there’s no sex in it — no bonking, I mean. There’s a lot about sexual feelings. This, for example:
     
Today my eyes have rested upon her for the first time. It is said that sleep can make an eyelid so heavy that it closes of its own accord; perhaps this glance of mine has a similar effect. Her eyes close, and yet obscure forces stir within her. She does not see that I am looking at her, she feels it, feels it through her whole body. Her eyes close and it is night, but inside her it is broad daylight.
     
    Perhaps that’s how Jake pulls the birds.
    The second part of Either/Or consists of some inordinately long letters from B to A, attacking A’s philosophy of life, and urging him to give up melancholy and get his act together. B seems to be a lawyer or a judge, and is happily married. He’s a bit of a prig, actually, but a shrewd one. The bit I quoted just now about melancholy’s infinitude is from his second letter, entitled “The Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality,” but the book as a whole is about the opposition of the aesthetic and the ethical. A is the aesthete, B is the ethicist, if that’s a word. (Yes, it is. Just looked it up.) A says: either/or, it doesn’t matter what you choose, you will regret your choice whatever it is. “If you marry, you will regret it, if you do not marry you will regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both,” and so on. That’s why A is so interested in seduction (whether the seduction of Cordelia was real or imagined, A is clearly fascinated by the idea, which means so was old Søren), because to him marriage entails choice (which he would inevitably regret) whereas seduction makes someone else choose and leaves him free. By having Cordelia, Johannes proved to himself that she wasn’t worth having, and is free to discard her and go back to his melancholy. “My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known,” he says. “What wonder then that I love her in return?”
    B says you must choose. To choose is to be ethical. He defends marriage. He attacks melancholy. “Melancholy is sin, really it is a sin as great as any, for it is the sin of not willing deeply and sincerely, and this is the mother to all sins.” He is kind enough to add: “I gladly admit that melancholy is in a sense not a bad sign, for as a rule only the most gifted natures are afflicted with it. ” But B is in no doubt that the ethical life is superior to the aesthetic. “The person who lives ethically has seen himself, knows himself, permeates his whole concretion with his consciousness, does not allow vague thoughts to fuss around in him, nor tempting possibilities to distract him with their legerdemain... He knows himself.” Or herself.