First term to come to my mind would be an association with its somehow “opposite”, nostalgia, a feeling related to remembrance of a previous time in life when I felt happy, thrilled, or experiencing good things that had a deep interpersonnal aspect. Some great time in family, at school, with friends, or ofc with a beloved woman.
But then, I spoke about nostalgia.
Melancholy does not refer about a present relationship with a present “missing” feeling of a “perceived as positive” past. On a first layer of understanding, melancholy refers for me to a present attachement to a more difficult one. Like this more negative past is also a part of me, that defined my way of being despite its consequences. I spoke in a recent post about my mistakes at school, being rebellious, “me against the world”, “standing as tall as I could for the things I believed in, defending what I felt was “mine”, as reckless and inoperant as it was” to the point I stopped my scholarity for 4 years and made my later return at school quite laborious. I was not happy nor in peace at the time, very sad, very pressured, and yet I was somehow “whole”, “true to myself”, “independant”. And in my heart, I somehow feel that I’m not fully like that anymore, despite the people who know me would probably say that I moderated myself enough to cope with reality and the balance of power between me and the world without loosing “my ways”. Melancholy as a “present state of being”, referring to a “past full state of self being”, referring to one’s youth, with everything coming with it, whatever good or bad experiences one went through…
But than that’s not the whole deal about melancholia.
I loved a woman from the Slavic Balkans, and she expressed a lot of that feeling, even did put the word melancholy on it. But contrary to me, it was not only a “underneath state of being”, but a “constant way of being”. It’s like melancholy was a part of her, a very structural trait of her being, related to herself about what I previously expressed for myself, but not only. Something deeper, like it came from her very core, always glowing from her among her other personnality traits and always offsetting her behavior. An unexplainable sadness. “Things are like this anyway”, even if they could easily be otherwise in my opinion. That “depth of melancholy” was foreign to me, and at time, I felt unable to interract with that part of her. Before meeting her, I had an “adverse feeling” toward melancholia, I was already defiant to Melancholia, judging this feeling “negative” and “useless” out of my quite structured logics. After we parted ways, I guess I had met true Melancholia, deepened my “unverbalizable knowledge” about it, somehow understood more deeply and confirmed why I was apprehending it already, and I kept a wound out of it, for I also understood that melancholy was something “unreachable” in someone’s truly having this character trait, to the point it would absolutely not be rationnalizable and reasoned with. And deep down, I feel/think than mixed with some other stuff, it made impossible what would have been otherwise possible. :)
When I was younger, I heard than Slavic people had something in them about melancholia. And 2 days ago, I read a post on quora from a new friend that describe melancholia like a part of the Slavic soul. Well, I witnessed that firsthand and felt it into someone else. And boy… Deep melancholia is as unexplainable as it is powerfull.
I’m sorry if my explanation is quite a mess. I guess, that at some point, tring to explain the inexplanable leads to this ! :)
Explanation:
